Wow! They all sound good. Thanks for posting them, Weed.

In return, here's one I've made for years, simply called

Braised Fennel

1 medium onion, sliced thin
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbls olive oil
1 large fennel bulb, cored & sliced thin
1/4 tsp anise seeds
1/4 tsp salt
Black pepper to taste
1 tsp grated orange rind
1 1/4 cups water
1/2 tbls white miso
1/2 tbls arrowroot
chopped red cabbage
juice of half a lime

Saute onons and garlic until onions wilt, 3-4 minutes. Add the fennel, anise seed, salt & pepper. Soock, uncovered, 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add 1 cup water, the lime juice, and orange rind. Cover and simmer about 20 minutes until fennel is tender. Mix the miso and arrowroot with remaining water. When fellel is tender remove it with a slotted spoon and set aside.

Bring liquid to boil. Add the mso mixture and cook, stirring continuously, until mixture is clear and thickened, about 60 seconds. Remove from heat.

Put a bed of cabbage (or chopped radicchio) on a platter. Spread fennel on top. Spoon sauce over all.

Serve at room temperature or chilled.

I've also got, in my to-try file, a recipe for Braised Fennel with Chestnuts and Shalots. If you want it, I'll post the recipe.

OMG weed - that looks AMAZING!

I will definitely make this for my next dinner party - I have some friends who are fennel fanatics too!

Alexa

gardenlad, thanks for the recipe - sounds wonderful!

Alexa - heya! It really is delicious, and looks great too. You will not be disappointed.

Weed, I was looking in the index of Ann Clark's fish cookbook for an orange-fennel (seeds, not bulbs) marinade I've made before and came across this fennel fish recipe. I haven't made it but it sounds interesting.

FISH WITH ORANGE AND FENNEL serves 2

1 lb. red snapper fillets *
1 tsp. EV olive oil
pinch of salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 ½ Tbs. Pernod **
1 navel orange, peeled and sliced, each slice cut into quarters
1 large fennel bulb, rinsed and finely chopped
1 large red onion, halved root end to stem end and very thinly sliced
1/3 cup fresh fennel greens, rinsed and finely chopped

Slice the fish into two or four equal pieces and place in a small oiled baking dish. Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with Pernod. Mix together the remaining ingredients and scatter evenly over the fillets.

Bake in preheated 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes or 10 minutes per inch of thickness including the vegetables. Test with fork to determine when the fish is opaque, milky white, and cooked through. Serve immediately on warmed plates.

* - redfish, striped bass, halibut, grouper, rockfish, drum, porgy or monkfish can be substituted for the snapper.
** - Pernod, the anise-flavored apertif, reinforces the flavor of the fennel. Use lime juice if Pernod is unavailable but the flavor will be different.

Weed's got 'fennel vision'.

Gardenlad - I would love, love, love the recipe for Braised Fennel with Chestnuts and Shalots. I have all three right now. The Korean supermarket that I recently discovered has wonderful fennel all the time and I bought fennel, chestnuts and shallots there on my weekend shopping trip. TIA

Oh Jessy "fennel vision" BIG GROAN!

Lee

Lee, that's just Jessy. Everyone knows she ain't right. ;>)

Braised Fennel with Chestnuts and Shallots

6 fennel bulbs or 12 baby fennel bulbs
4 tbls unslted butter
15 small shallots
1/2 pound fresh chestnuts, peeled
2 tbls sugar
2 1/4 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

Trim the fennel, reserving some of the fronds for garnish. Remove the outer layers, if necessary. Quarter the bulbs lenghwise, remove the cores.

In a large, wide saucepan, melt 1 tbls of the butter over medium high heat. Add the shallots and chestnuts and saute, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or until the chestnuts are browned on all sides. Cover the pan, reduce the heat to low, and cook, shaking the pan occasionally utnil the chestnuts are slightly tender, about 5 minutes. Remove the shallots and chestnuts from the pan and set aside.

Add the remaining butter to the pan and melt it over medium-high heat. Add the fennel and sugar and saute until fennel is well browned on all sides, about 12 minutes. If the sugar begins to burn, reduce heat and continue cooking.

Add shallots, chestnuts, broth, slat and pepper to the fennel; stir to combine, removing any crispy bits from the bottom of the pan. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook, carefyully turning vegetables occasionally, until they are tender, about 20 mintues. Uncover, raise heat to medium high, and cook until liquid is reduced to a glaze, 12-15 minutes.

Transfer to a serving dish, garnish with fennel fronds, and serve immediately.

Let us know how this works out for you. Like I say, it's been in my to-try file for some time, but I haven't gotten around to making it.

Gardenlad, Lee has had the priviledge of meeting me in person. Poor thing, I don't think she has quite recovered yet.

Well, we'll let her decide if "priviledge" is persactly the right word.

Further depondent sayeth not.

Thank you so much for the recipe; it sounds wonderful. I'll definitely try it in the next few days. The hardest part will be peeling the chestnuts. I'll post back after I've tried it.

Of course I've recovered Jessy, I'm ready to meet again at any time!

Lee

The braised fennel was very good Gardenlad. I did have trouble peeling my chestnuts even with trying a new method of cutting them in half, then nuking in a covered dish with a little water. I made the recipe with two large fennel bulbs and 12 shallots and about half a pound of chestnuts, I added about a teaspoon of balsamic at the end to brighten the flavor. I think the next time I make it I'll use vacuum packed peeled chestnuts. The dish was very rich because some of my small pieces of chestnut broke down into the sauce. It was very tasty but not so pretty. Hopefully the next time I make it, it will be worthy of a picture.

Thanks again,

Lee

At a guess I'm gonne hazard two things.

First, there wasn't enough fennel to make it pretty. You used a third of what was called for, and close to the full amounts of everything else. So there wasn't enough to meat to support the gravy, if you know what I mean.

Didn't want to say anything about a recipe I hadn't tried, but I was also concerned about the timings given. 45 minutes seems like an awfully long time to be cooking fennel. Did it fall apart on you (thus making it less pretty)? My gut feeling would have been to pull the fennel before boiling down to a glaze, then return it at that point.

Adding the balsamic sounds like a nice touch. I reckon I would have used white balsamic, though, just to keep the color line going.

Nobody around here is selling chestnuts yet. Soon as they go on sale I'm definately going to give this one a try.

There was plenty of fennel GL. I used two large bulbs each cut into six wedges, I didn't remove any of the core because the fennel I buy seems to have tender cores. So I had a shallot for every piece of fennel and it didn't seem like too large a quantity of chestnuts by the time I lost a lot that wouldn't come out of the shells. The fennel browned nicely and kept it's shape. What made the dish not pretty was the fact that I had chestnut pieces and crumbles that broke down into the sauce. The shallots stayed whole and pretty. I don't know how long I cooked it, definitely not forty five minutes - just until the fennel was tender. I thought about using white balsamic but the sauce was already brown. I will try this again.

How do you peel your chestnuts?

One last thought - I did cook this in a cast iron pan, that wouldn't have an effect on the crumbled up chestnuts, but could it have had an effect on the color? I didn't add the balsamic until just before I took everything out of the pan so I know that did not change the color. Although I've had cast iron pans for decades I've never used them for anything other than searing meats and an occasional fried egg. I don't know if there are are things that just shouldn't be cooked in them.

Lee

>How do you peel your chestnuts? With great difficulty. ;>)

What I do is cut an X in the pointy end, then boil them until the shells peel back from the cuts. After that it's pull off the shells, which works better when the chestnuts are warm. Even so, it's a real pain.

I'm sure there must be a better way.

>I don't know if there are are things that just shouldn't be cooked in them. I've never found anything that shouldn't be cooked in cast iron. Most of my cooking is in cast iron (the rest in stainless), and properly cured cast iron does not cause any color changes in food.

I'm gonna guess that the dissolved chestnut pieces are what made the sauce brown.

Lee, in his book, Artisnal Cooking, Terrance Brennan says if you cut an X in the flat side of the chestnuts, roast them in a preheated 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, and let them cool, they peel relatively easily.

I haven't tried it that way, but thought I'd pass it on.

Those directions accompany his Chestnut-Fennel Soup with Apple/Walnut Chutney. If anyone wants the recipe I'll post it.