Fennel Awesomeness

When you have a lot of one kind of the same vegetable, you might want to enlarge your repertoire of dishes that contain it. But then you have the one simple delicious dish that you can make over and over again. For example, we had lots of sugar snap peas, which we used for stir fries and cold noodle Thai salads, but mostly, we ate them as a salad, by simply blanching them and then adding salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. They are delicious as they are simple.

We just started exploring the possibilities with fennel, and only used it thrice* so far, but I already know what my favorite fennel recipe is:



Roasted fennel with balsamic vinegar and olive oil!
So simple: just cut the fennel in half or quarters, place it in a casserole dish, spray olive oil on top, smother with drizzles of vinegar, sprinkle some salt, and cover. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes or until nice and soft all the way through. We baked it at the same time Mark's Best Roasted Potatoes Ever were baking, and enjoyed a very yummy dinner.


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* The first time out of the tree was a failing attempt to make this very recipe -- covering the casserole dish is crucial!

Mark's Gross Dinner

Mark always makes fun of me for cooking new, weird things all the time. He finds it unusual that everytime I cook something it contains new combinations of ingredients and that I keep making new things, instead of making the good, old, tried-and-perfected dish. Hence, everything I cook is bound to be "gross". Well, last night he made a "gross" dinner. It was delicious :)



For some unknown reason he decided to try and combine ingredients in a way he has never tried before. Moreover, he did that without following any recipe!
Basically it's whole wheat pasta with asparagus and other veggies, sauteed in olive oil. The veggies include fennel (mostly leaves -- the bulbs are still very small) and parsley from our garden. Also featured are tomatoes, olives, and lots of garlic.

Thai Red Curry

Making Thai red curry feels like cheating. Well, if you use red curry paste it does. You hardly do anything, and you get a rich and complex flavor. No herbs and spices needed (well, except for the ones in the red curry paste) - I'm not used to that!



I basically followed this recipe, adding whatever vegetables I had on hand: broccoli, carrots, water chestnuts, and - of course - delicious sugar snap pea from our garden.



I started by mixing 3 T of red curry paste I got from Lee Lee's (the one doesn't contain any animal ingredients) with some basil and 2 cans of coconut milks. This made it very soupy, as evident in the pictures. Once the mixture was gently boiling I added the veggies and tofu, and simmered till the broccoli stalks were soft enough for me. Can't get much simpler than that, and still qualify as making dinner from scratch, can it?

Served it on long grain brown rice.

Mustard Greens and Feta Ebelskivers

These are my first true ebelskivers:


Aren't they cute?
I was afraid they wouldn't come out right, because I overloaded them, but somehow it worked!
The recipe calls for spinach, but I used mustard greens, because we have plenty of it, while our spinach is yet to grow. My less successful ebelskivers are actually better for showing the greens:


They were very fluffy and spicy (from the mustard) and the ones that had a lot of feta inside them were the best.