making friends (and fronds) with fennel
from pesto to salad and beyond!
Hello everyone! Happy Memorial Day. It’s been a while since we’ve sent out a food-related dispatch, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been cooking. Here, we get into the many wonders of fennel and give you a lil recipe for an herbaceous condiment. Herbaceous is a great word.
In non-cooking news, we have a show this week! Queers N Peers: Corporate Pride is on Thursday, June 1 at Dromedary, 7pm. More info and tickets here — it’s gonna be a good one.
Back to food news, Porcelain, a local restaurant we think is so tasty and exciting, recently announced it’s closing on June 6, and that’s a shame. Go there if you’re able! We’ve tried over half the menu now and everything is just invigoratingly good.
xoxo
Cass + Babz
Frondly Greetings, Fellow Pesto Enthusiast…
By Babz
I try, desperately hard, to not get caught up in the dietary news of the day. My relationship to food is fragile enough as it is, and Instagram is already trying its hardest to make me skip lunch. Fuck that.
However, upon hearing the news that french fries were making me Extra Depressed – which unfortunately I can, at least, anecdotally back-up – I actually took a step back and said, “y’know… maybe I should start packing a lunch.”
See here’s the thing. I’ve spent my entire young adult life in food service. I started at my local bar and grill a few months before my 15th birthday and now, as I start my landing approach to my 30th birthday, I can officially say I’ve spent more years in a restaurant than out. Scary.
What that does to you is make your food schedule completely wonky. You’re working when everyone else is supposed to be eating. It used to be, and sometimes still is, despite New York’s new labor laws that guarantees a 20 minute break per six hour shift, that you would get a shift meal around 4pm and then pull a 8-10 hour shift, leaving you ravenous and sometimes stealing unfinished food off of other people’s plates. Sad!
Back home in Baltimore, there wasn’t even a shift meal at that bar and grill. I would dip dinner rolls in chipotle ranch or honey mustard in my moments of true desperation. Basically what I’m saying is that, for the last 15 years, I’ve spent 40 hours a week being a little scavenging rat.
Things have improved in terms of what restaurants are willing to give you, but 4 plates of fried potatoes a week still ain’t great - by the time Sunday rolls around, I’m finishing off my last shift of the week feeling kind of gross and dreaming of spinach leaves.
I’ve never been a meal prepper. I don’t have the executive function for that – but I have been trying my best to have whole foods in the house to bring with me to work. (Cassidy said packing a lunch makes her feel Virtuous and honestly, me too, I’ve never felt closer to God). And in that effort, trying to use all of the fruits and veggies Cassidy so diligently keeps stocked in our fridge has become sort of a game.
Fennel has been one of the veggies of which we’ve become the most fond. Cassidy makes this killer salad with blood orange that she’ll talk about below - but it leaves behind most of the fennels’ bushy fronds. They have a flavor sort of similar to dill, but are a little less pungent, making them perfect for pesto!
Making sauces and condiments myself is sort of like meal prepping to me. Pesto in particular is quite versatile in its use - from pasta sauce to sandwiches. Which is what I need most from the stuff I keep in the fridge. It’s a Yes And kind of gal, and so am I. And without further ado - here’s a recipe for ya!
Fennel Frond Pesto
Ingredients
Fronds of one head of fennel
3 cloves of fresh garlic (a natural preservative!)
~2 oz parmesan cheese
A handful of pine nuts (sub walnuts or cashews if you don’t want to splurge)
~½ cup of olive oil
Salt to taste
Directions
Cut fronds and cheese so it fits in a food processor or blender. Shove everything in there and start your engine! Add more olive oil if it looks a little too pasty - you’re going for something that’s easily spreadable, and the oil should give your finished product a nice sheen.
It’s that simple!
Fennel Friends and Raw Rewards
By Cassidy Dawn Graves
There are a lot of foods in this world that I arbitrarily decided I didn’t like as a child. Beef in all forms but hot dog and pepperoni (still mostly true), McDonald’s (changed my mind about this in college), sour cream (don’t like big globs but a drizzle is fine), dill (still working on this one).
Another ingredient that graced this mental list was the little seeds found in sausages, which despite their size, packed a bold flavor that I found too intrusive. I always thought these were fennel seeds — they might actually be caraway, tbh — and so I was never very interested in exploring anything fennel.
As you might expect, that’s no longer the case. I’m still not a huge fan of licorice flavor as it's found in candies and the like, but the licorice (or anise, if you’re fancy) tones of fennel are more complex and easy to tinker with. I think my first true and unabashed brush with fennel was around 2019 or 20 when I made the Smitten Kitchen fennel and blood orange salad.
I’d never cooked with fennel, much less used it raw — but I got one in my produce box, and as Babz said, I am always trying to use up all the stuff we have in the fridge. The salad combines thinly-sliced fennel with shallots, mint, toasted nuts (you gotta toast ‘em), citrus juice, olive oil, and pepper.
I should mention another thing I disliked growing up was fruit in salads. It didn’t make sense to me, I guess? So this salad was a risk. I made it for just myself, and accepted that I might not like it. Fortunately, it was incredibly tasty, and at this point I’ve made it at least five more times.
It’s tangy, savory, and refreshing. There are all sorts of flavors and textures going on, and they all get along so well. They’re all hanging out and having a great time together, chatting and vibing as they ferry down your gullet.
Anyway, if you think raw fennel might be too much for you, this salad is an incredible counterargument, though I should note that cutting the little membranes off the orange slices takes forever. It’s worth it.
And while I’ve never made the fennel pesto (yet), I’ve consumed it in many forms now, and it’s always a delight. Multiple pastas, baked fish, a grilled cheese made extra-creamy with mashed white beans… There are all sorts of possibilities. Why not create a bond with the bulb and the frond? (Now I’m picturing some cartoon fennel parts, uniting to save the city.)