The fruits of the kitchen...

[alexpgp]

With Galina gone, I've not been very organized about the consumption of food, which may have its good points, but also certainly its bad ones.

Today, I set about making another batch of cockaleekie soup, and while the soup was on the stove, I decided to make a recipe for a fennel-and-mushroom salad that Galina and I saw on a Cooking Channel telecast on French cooking. The recipe called for fennel, which I don't recall having ever bought before, and a shallot, which some Google research suggests is "an onion with an altogether too high opinion of itself."

I just had a late lunch and can report the following:

The salad was okay, but nothing that causes me to foam at the mouth (probably a good thing) and swear to make repeatedly for the rest of my life. That said, I think it would make a fine salad course for a meal on the veranda once the weather turns to spring.

The soup was—the soup. Had I added any more of any component, I would have ended up with more of a stew than a soup. (Don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining.) The recipe is dirt simple: chicken meat, some chopped onion, some barley, and leeks. Some spices and greens, too. Very filling. It should last several days.

Cheers...

Comments

[vuzh.livejournal.com]

Fennel is good, and it grows very well in our yard... I don't know if the climate down there is different enough that you'd have a tough time growing it. It's ornamental too, it looks a lot like dill.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, besides owning a house that sits on top of a shale outcrop, in which a handful of trees continue to obstinately hang on for (literally) dear life, the few places that might theoretically support other kinds of plants are subject to the predations of plant-eaters. (I recall with clarity the first time I surprised an elk gorging himself on the flowers planted a scant two yards from our threshold.)

Still, it's an idea.

Cheers...

[vuzh.livejournal.com]

Shale is a bit more buried here than where you are, although you could throw a rock from Berthoud and hit the base of the lifting of the Rockies.

Funny, even when we lived in Estes, we didn't have an elk "problem", mostly because we lived right next door to an enormous, open, verdant valley that must have seemed like a smörgåsbord to them.

We usually have a few black swallowtail caterpillars on our fennel, that's the only pest I've seen... although the flowers do attract paper wasps (which are among the most docile wasps I've ever encountered).