Fig Jam with Fennel Pollen and Bay Leaves

What the fig? Another fig jam? I was actually intending to make fig jam with chipotle chili powder when I remembered that fig and fennel would be a good pairing. I recently discovered fennel pollen (yes, it’s really pollen and can you imagine what that’s like to harvest?). It is intensely aromatic, sweet, a beautiful yellow color like saffron, which is also pollen. And it imparts an anise-like flavor with a haunting aftertaste. I made my standard microwave version of fig jam, adding lemon juice and fennel pollen at the end. I thought both would fade if I incorporated them earlier. I wasn’t sure how much fennel pollen to add, so I started with a teaspoonful, waited a few minutes, tasted the jam and increased it slightly. The small batch that I didn’t can but rather set aside to taste developed a more distinctive fennel flavor as it cooled and mellowed.  I used black mission figs, but the green ones would be fine.

 Fig Jam with Rosemary and Lemon

1½ dry pint fresh Black Mission figs, rinsed and cut into ½-inch pieces (about 1¼ lb or 3 c)

1 c sugar

1 bay leaf

Pinch of salt

1 tbsp lemon juice

1½ tsp fennel pollen

Place the figs, sugar, bay leaf ,and salt in a heatproof bowl that fits in the microwave oven and stir to combine. Let the mixture macerate for at least 30 minutes.

Prepare jars for water bath canning. Place a saucer in the freezer for testing the gel.

Microwave the mixture at high speed for 6-8 minutes or until boiling. Remove and stir. Put the bowl back in the microwave and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring and checking the gel. Continue to cook for another few minutes until the gel has set.

Remove the bowl from the microwave oven and fish out the bay leaf (watching out for little pieces if it hasn’t stayed intact). Add the lemon juice and fennel pollen. Let the mixture sit for a few minutes to allow the flavors to meld.

Spoon the jam into warm prepared jars. Check for air bubbles.

Seal the jars and process them in a water bath canner for 10 minutes after the water comes to a boil. Turn off the heat, remove the canner lid and let sit for 5 minutes before removing the jars to a counter to sit undisturbed until cool.

Makes 3 eight-ounce jars or 6 four-ounce jars, which I prefer.

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Summer Bean Salads

A pot of beans is a summer savior.  Cooked dried beans are so versatile that you can use them in a salad, as a side dish, in soup, pureed as an appetizing spread. I like to cook up a whole pot of them over the weekend, which is hardly a burdensome task, and have them available for impromptu uses throughout the week. These are white cannellini beans, or white kidney beans.

The key to flavorful bean salads, in my view, is the dressing.  For one of my recent salads, I used the Fennel à la Grecque that I made earlier in the month. I chopped the fennel pieces, and combined them with beans that were moistened by the poaching liquid, an unctuous combination of olive oil, white wine and lemon. This was a perfect foil to sautéed shrimp, making this a one-dish meal.

The other  salad uses a garlicky dressing that I’ve been making for a while, based on an internet source I no longer can locate. I heated a crushed clove of peeled garlic in olive oil and let it sit for 5 minutes.  I then placed the mixture into my mini-chopper with a few anchovies (you could omit them and use salt but the depth of flavor is very good and it doesn’t make the dressing taste fishy), a splash of vinegar, and some snipped woody herb, like sage or rosemary. Here I used rosemary since I like it with beans and tomatoes, the vegetable I chose to add to the salad.  I brought the refrigerated beans and their liquid to a simmer, drained and reserved the liquid and tossed the beans with the warm dressing to help the flavors become acquainted. When the beans were cool and ready to be served, I checked the seasonings, added a few chopped tomatoes (good use for the millions of cherry tomatoes that crop up at this time of year), and finished it with rosemary leaves.

I served the bean salad on a bed of small kale leaves that had been tossed in the same vinegar. My garden has been producing great kale from the same plants for nearly a year! That’s crazy but true. I’m about to rip them all out and start over but it’s tempting not to after all the hard work to keep them from bolting. 

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Fennel à la Grecque and a Platter of Hors d’Oeuvres

The second of a two-part series on ideas for using the whole fennel plant – bulb, stalks and fronds – in several complementary dishes… 

We were pretending to be in Provence, on vacation.  Cold fennel à la Grecque. And a platter of fennel-flecked crostini served in the raking light of late afternoon. There were crostini topped with a garlicky mash of beans that had been cooked in fennel frond broth. There were crostini with goat cheese infused with the lemony broth from the poached fennel bulbs and topped with the residual confit of lemon and onion. That was the brilliance of making fennel à la Grecque: not only were there slices of fennel bulb and tender stalks, but also the delicious aromatics and the broth.

The French phrase “à la Grecque” means “Greek-style” and refers to a way of preparing vegetables usually for an appetizer course, although I find them useful as side dishes or salads. The vegetables are lightly poached in olive oil, vinegar, lemon and white wine, and seasoned with a spice like coriander seed. Here I used fennel seed, no surprise for a full-fennel mode, and black peppercorns. I also added sliced onion and garlic. While the fennel was excellent, the lemon and onions stole the show, melting into a confit that was delicious on its own. That was partly because the lemon – peel and all – was sliced super thin and the onions were cut into little half moons. They were simmered in the warmed liquid for 15 minutes before the fennel was lightly poached. The recipe was adapted from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables but I changed the proportions of oil to liquid, cutting the oil in half and increasing the white wine. As it was, it was a little oily for my taste, but the broth made a good base for salad dressing, especially for potatoes and beans.

Fennel a la Grecque adapted from Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Vegetables

1 medium or 4 very small bulbs of fennel

½ c olive oil

¾ c white wine vinegar

½ c white wine

½ lemon, washed and thinly sliced crosswise

½ large onion, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise

3 small garlic cloves, sliced

2 tsp fennel seeds

2 tsp black peppercorns

1 large bay leaf

Trim the fennel bulb(s) and reserve any tender stalks. If tiny (2½ x 3 inches or so), slice them in half lengthwise. If larger, cut them longwise into wedges.

Heat the olive oil, vinegar and wine in a saucepan. When just simmering, add the rest of the ingredients, except for the fennel, and simmer gently for about 15 minutes.

Add the fennel and continue to simmer until it is tender but still slightly firm.

Remove the fennel from the liquid and let it cool. When both the fennel and the poaching liquid are cool, recombine them into a jar with a tightly fitting lid and let cure, refrigerated, for 24 hours before serving.  Both the fennel and the lemon-onion confit should be used. The poaching liquid makes a great dressing for beans.

Crostini

Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Slice a baguette into ¼-inch pieces and array them on a baking sheet. Melt a little butter with olive oil and add minced herbs and a little salt. Brush the bread on one side and bake slowly for about 10 minutes until crisp. Cool and store in an airtight container. They’ll keep for a few days.

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Waste Not Want Not: Fennel Frond Broth for Cooking Beans and Making Soup

The first of a two-part series on ideas for using the whole fennel plant – bulb, stalks and fronds – in several complementary dishes…

One of the great advantages of belonging to a CSA or growing your own food, even in a little kitchen garden like mine, is that you often obtain the entire plant. The bulb of fennel and bushy fronds, beets, radishes and turnips with their edible greens, cilantro with its roots, peas with pods, and so on.  Even though what’s typically offered in the supermarket, or even in the local organic grocery, is trimmed to the most prevalent form of the vegetable, maybe just maybe, that’s because that’s more durable, longer lasting, prettier to display, easier to ship. Personally, I get a lot of pleasure from seeing how vegetables, fruits and flowers grow. And when we have an excess of something, I feel free to experiment.

Fennel from our CSA provided just that opportunity as it came bunched in pairs, with relatively small bulbs and nearly 30-inch long stalks laden with bright green fronds. I say “bulbs” since that’s what the base of fennel resembles. Actually, in so-called Florence fennel, the bulb type, these are thick stalks. Think of them like celery, or even chard. (Fennel, without the bulb habit, is typically thought of as an herb, harvested for its leaves.)

It’s easy to figure out what to do with the bulbs and the tender stalks, but that volume of fronds was daunting.  I’ve gone through a full-fennel experience in the fall, at the beginning of the Dark Days, so I know that successive cooking of various parts is a good idea. Sometime, I will elaborate on my theory – actually a method – of successive cooking, a one-thing-leads-to-another approach, related largely to the use and re-use of water. That’s what started me off .  

First, I soaked dried baby lima beans in water overnight and drained them, discarding the water. (This was hardly necessary because they turned out to be young beans that would cook relatively quickly.) I covered the drained beans with fresh water, added salt and a giant handful of fennel fronds, and lightly simmered them stovetop for an hour or so. I separated the beans from the liquid to cool, and then re-combined them to store. The beans became infused with the anise/licorice flavor and aroma of the fennel and the resulting broth was amazing. From the beans, the broth had the viscosity of chicken stock and, from the fennel, an alluring herb flavor and greenish hue.

Fennel and Bean Soup

I made soup from the beans, broth and separately braised fennel, sprinkled with fresh fennel fronds. A little freshly ground black pepper is all the extra flavoring it needed.

Mixed Bean Salad

I also made a delicious, garlicky mixed bean salad by combining the cooked limas and yellow wax beans and green beans that were cooked until tender in fennel-bean broth. Dressed with a clove or two of garlic mashed to a paste with salt and doused with olive oil, as well as a few chopped fennel fronds, this was a very flavorful salad that would be great to take to a picnic.

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Dark Days 4: Tuna and a Fennel Fest

A continuing series on weekly meals that use sustainable, organic, local and ethical food during the challenging winter months. For more information, go here to the DDC section of Not Dabbling in Normal’s website: Dark Days Challenge .

For the 4^th week of the Dark Days Challenge, I served locally fished albacore tuna baked in fennel fronds on a bed of oven-roasted slices of fennel bulb. This was topped with a slaw of fennel stems and carrots in a dressing of local apple cider, maple syrup and butternut squash seed oil. As a bonus, I made a tomato-fennel-carrot soup using fennel scraps and an organic Amish Paste tomato and shallot sauce that I canned during last summer’s CSA season.

I have been looking into obtaining “local” fish and came across never-frozen albacore tuna in the market, which came from fisherman based at the Jersey Shore. I didn’t realize that a good proportion of fresh albacore tuna – which I always associate with the Pacific Northwest – is fished off the mid-Atlantic coast.  I decided to cook half of what I bought for dinner and preserved the rest in olive oil to use over the next month. Of course, right after I did this, my husband happened to travel to the shore for some other purpose and I convinced him to bring back some local catch, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

I notice that there’s a tendency to parse out menus into meat, starch, vegetable, salad. People even tend to isolate them on their plates. I actually don’t see things that way. I don’t mind a skewed menu, so long as it doesn’t skew too much toward meat. I also like to layer things, which makes for tricky photographic problems.

The Dark Days Challenge cleans out the refrigerator and finds fennel. Whoo hoo! I had a slightly shriveled but still really flavorful bulb of organic fennel from our CSA and another, with a few fronds attached, that I picked up at the farmers’ market a few weeks ago. It was from a local farm that doesn’t certify itself as organic but probably uses sustainable principles.  (I would like to do more homework on that topic.)

We like our vegetables and I like to experiment with multiple ways of cooking a single category to make a meal that seems that it has a lot of variety. This is a perfect case in point.  I roasted slices of the bulb as a base for roasted tuna that had been flavored with fennel fronds. I grated the stalks and scraps of the bulbs along with carrots to make a raw slaw to serve on top of the tuna, dressed with local apple cider and maple syrup and my new favorite butternut squash seed oil. The fennel took on different tastes and textures throughout the dish. You’d never have guessed it was a Johnny-one-note meal.

Finally, I gathered all of the scraps of fennel and cooked them with leftover Dark Days turkey stock to make a base for tomato-fennel soup. The tomatoes came from a lovely tomato-shallot sauce that I canned last summer from shallots and heirloom Amish Paste tomatoes from our CSA.  In addition to canning peeled tomatoes and tomato puree, I have been making flavored sauces that are great bases for other dishes or useful on their own. This works well for Dark Days when you might not have access to local organic green peppers, shallots, celery, herbs and other ingredients that are plentiful in season. Obviously, I’m a pantry person.

Oven-roasted Fennel

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Slice the fennel blub vertically into ¼-inch slices. Sprinkle with vegetable oil (I used butternut squash seed oil but olive oil would be more typical) and salt.  Roast, turning once, until tender and brown, about 15-20 minutes.

Oven-roasted Tuna in Fennel Fronds

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Sprinkle the tuna with vegetable oil (I used butternut squash seed oil but olive oil would be more typical) and salt. Toss with chopped fennel fronds. Roast until barely cooked through (it will continue to cook as it cools). Let it sit for a few minutes to firm up, then slice for serving. This keeps the fish from overcooking. It can be served lukewarm.

Fennel and Carrot Slaw with Apple Cider and Maple Syrup Dressing

Thinly slice or grate raw fennel stalks and any spare sections of the bulbous base. I used the large-holed side of a box grater, which took the green parts of the stalks and left the fibrous portions to be discarded (or used to make broth). Peel and grate a carrot and combine with the fennel.  Make salad dressing of 2 parts apple cider, 1 part maple syrup and 1 part vegetable oil such as butternut squash. (I used teaspoons of each.)

Tomato Fennel and Carrot Soup

1-2 c of fennel pieces, brown or damaged parts removed

1 c homemade turkey or chicken stock (or vegetable broth)

1 carrot, grated

1 pint home-canned tomato sauce with shallots (or add a leek to the mixture and use good quality canned tomatoes, pureed, and cook the soup longer)

Simmer the fennel pieces in the broth until tender. Puree in a food processor, leaving the mixture slightly chunky, and return to the pan. Add the grated carrot and the tomato sauce.  Simmer for about 20 minutes. Garnish with fennel fronds if you have them and roasted carrots.

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Waste Not Want Not: Braised Fennel, Tomato-Orange Sauce, and Manicotti with Fennel Frond Pesto

After a weekend of canning tomatoes, including a lovely Provençale-style tomato sauce with orange and rosemary, I had a little leftover sauce, a leftover half of an orange (precious at this time of year) and a large (3-foot-long) bulb of Florence fennel with stalks and fronds intact, courtesy of our CSA farm. I hadn’t figured out our weekday night supper, and this combo just sprung to mind. I used the delicious sauce for pasta (manicotti stuffed with ricotta seasoned with fennel frond pesto and orange zest) but in a more prosperous time, I might have used the sauce as a base for a simply baked white fish topped it with Niçoise olives. 

I like braising fennel in citrus, typically using lemon. Here, orange juice and zest complemented the tomatoes and provided a kick that was tweaked by the salty and grassy fennel frond pesto. 

This isn’t that complicated but there are a few independent steps if you make the dish that I did. You are first going to prepare the fennel, braising the bulb and stalks in olive oil, salt and orange juice, and turning the fronds into pesto. While the fennel is braising, you can prepare the tomato-orange sauce. If you are making manicotti, while the fennel and tomato sauce are simmering, you should boil the manicotti shells, and make a ricotta filling, which contains fennel fronds and orange zest, and fill the cooled manicotti shells. Finally, combine the tomato sauce with the braised fennel and spoon it over the top of the filled manicotti. 

Baked Manicotti with Tomato-Orange-Fennel Sauce

5-6 dried manicotti shells (or use fresh pasta sheets that you can roll yourself)

1 c ricotta cheese

2 tbsp fennel frond pesto (see below)

1 egg

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

Optional: grated parmesan cheese

Tomato-Orange-Fennel Sauce (see below)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Boil the manicotti shells (or fresh pasta sheets) in a large pot of water until slightly under al dente stage. Drain and cool.

Beat the ricotta cheese, fennel frond pesto, egg, salt and pepper together, adding the optional cheese at the end.

Fill the cooled manicotti shells with the ricotta cheese mixture.

Spoon a little tomato sauce on the bottom of a baking dish and place the filled manicotti on top. Spoon the tomato-orange-fennel sauce over the manicotti. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese if desired.

Bake for approximately 30 minutes or until bubbling. Set aside to cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Tomato-Orange-Fennel Sauce

6-8 plum tomatoes

1 clove garlic, minced

Olive oil

Juice of ½ orange

½ tsp orange zest

Salt

Fennel braised with orange juice (see below)

1 tbsp fennel frond pesto (see below)

Core the tomatoes and roughly chop them. Lightly cook the garlic in olive oil and add the tomatoes, turning the heat up so that the tomatoes boil and exude their liquid. Turn the heat down after about 5 minutes and simmer, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon, for about 10 minutes. Add the orange juice and zest, and salt to taste and simmer for at least 5 minutes.

To finish the sauce, add the braised fennel and the fennel frond pesto.

Fennel Braised with Orange Juice

I small bulb of young fennel with stalks (and leaves)

1 tbsp olive oil

Juice of ½ orange

½ tsp orange zest

Salt

Water (or chicken broth)

Trim the stalks from the bulb. Trim the base of the bulb, cut it in half vertically, remove the core, slicing it very thin, and slice the bulb vertically into slivers. Remove the fronds from the stalks and reserve them for another use.  Thinly slice the stalks on the diagonal.

Warm the olive oil in a saucepan and sauté the fennel lightly, add the orange juice and zest, cover the pot and braise until crisp tender, 10 minutes or less. Check occasionally and add water as needed, continuing to braise until the vegetables are tender. Season with salt to taste. Before serving, add a little orange juice to spark the flavor.

Fennel Frond Pesto

Strip the fennel fronds from the stalks and place them in a food processor. Add chopped garlic, salt and a little olive oil, and process them to a medium-fine consistency.

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Preserving Herbs Part 3: Freezing

A while ago, I posted Parts 1 and 2 of this series on preserving herbs for use year round. The second involved preserving herbs in salt (sage in that case) and the first preserving tender herbs in vinegar, including tarragon, basil and dill. Throughout the year, depending on the season, I also preserve herbs in the freezer. With the first heavy frost soon upon us, I have the urge not to waste the herbs remaining in my garden, although the ones in pots will be moved to the porch and will over-winter until we get severe cold or deep snow.

Some sturdy herbs, like savory and sage, can simply be placed in the freezer whole. This can also work with the tender herbs like marjoram, oregano and basil, separated into individual leaves. Usually I use typical Genovese basil but this year I am trying this with Thai basil, which is hard to find in the market.

Other herbs do best in pesto form, either a full-blown pesto that includes garlic and nuts along with salt and oil, or simply salt and oil. In my freezer,  I have pesto made from marjoram at the height of its glory a month or so ago, basil, dill, fennel fronds, and garlic scapes. While it’s tempting to make neat little cubes, they sometimes crumble. It’s easier (thank you Margaret Roach from A Way to Garden) to make rolls that can be sliced. After covering them in plastic wrap, I roll them in paper, which makes them stiff enough to survive my tendency to overstuff the freezer!

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Braised Fennel with Fennel Frond Pesto

The first little fennel bulbs of the season popped up at our CSA farm attached to a humungous (2 foot-long) stalk of beautiful, fresh fronds. Not wanting to waste any of that bounty, I made fennel frond pesto, froze some in a little tube to chop up later, and stirred some into braised fennel.

When freezing fennel frond pesto, I typically go easy on the garlic since I find it doesn’t freeze well. Instead, I just whir the fronds, picked clean from the stalks, in a food processor with salt, olive oil and sometimes some blanched almonds or pine nuts for texture. For using it fresh, I add a little chopped garlic.

To braise fennel, score the bulb and slice it lengthwise into slivers. Sauté them in a saucepan in a little olive oil or butter until it just starts to brown, add water or a chicken or vegetable stock, not quite to cover the vegetables and cook slowly, covering the pan, until tender. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. If there’s a lot of liquid left in the pan, remove the fennel and boil the liquid down to syrup and pour it over the fennel.

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Risotto with Fennel and Fennel Frond Pesto

Risotto with Fennel and Fennel Frond Pesto

Olive oil and/or butter

1-2 bulbs fennel, trimmed and thinly sliced lengthwise

Squeeze of lemon juice

Trimmings of fennel stalks – fronds separated from stalks

4-5 cups of chicken or vegetable stock

Fennel fronds

Olive oil

Salt

Clove of garlic (optional)

Pine nuts

½ medium onion, diced

Olive oil and/or butter (about 1 tbsp total)

1 cup Arborio rice

¼ cup white wine

Additional squeeze of lemon (optional)

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Salt and white pepper to taste

Prepare the fennel and the broth. Saute the sliced fennel in the oil or butter over moderate heat, browning it a little. Add a little water, turn the heat down, cover the pot and let the fennel braise. Add a squeeze of lemon and set aside while you make the risotto.

Meanwhile, bring the chicken broth to a boil, add the fennel trimmings (not a lot of fronds) and cook slowly to impart a fennel flavor to the broth.  Or make a vegetable stock using fennel.

Make the pesto. Place fennel fronds in a food processor, Add a little olive oil, salt, a few pine nuts for texture, and garlic if using. Process until it makes a thick pesto.

To make the risotto, saute the onion slowly in the oil and/or butter. Add the rice and stir to coat. Add the white wine and stir to allow it to evaporate. Add 1/3 cup of stock, turn the heat to medium low or low (so it just simmers) and stir until the stock is absorbed. When the liquid is absorbed, add another 1/3 cup of stock, wait until it’s absorbed, stirring occasionally, and then repeat until the rice is tender but still al dente. This process will take about 20-25 minutes.

Add the braised fennel and fennel frond pesto to the risotto, and adjust seasonings.

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Peas and Fennel

I was excited to get fennel from our CSA early in the season. In past years, the farmers have grown it late and it’s been a little tough. Unlike what you see at the grocery store, which is trimmed (for good reason), this fennel is about 30 inches high, with tons of fronds and a smallish but delicate bulb, We’ve been eating it raw, thinly sliced, as part of salad, but here I lightly braised fennel slices and combined them with snap peas from our garden. Simply prepared, this brings out the best of cooking and eating with the seasons.

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