It may come as a shock to anyone reading this blog regularly that I don't subsist entirely on cake, or pulled pork or pie. From time to time I have been known to eat the odd vegetable... and no vegetable is odder than fennel - a pale, squat, decidedly hardy bulb with delicate green fronds. Last
Sunday I was looking down
the barrel of an unusually busy week. I knew I'd get to the end of each
day and not feel much like cooking. I'd be hungry though and want
something warm and hearty to sustain me after a long day and propel me
into the next. Fennel wouldn't have been the obvious choice but I had a
new recipe I was keen to try out and because of this, had all the
ingredients to hand.
For a non-meat dish, I have to
say this was one of the messiest I'd ever cooked. The splatter factor
with the fennel (when frying it prior to adding the stock) was on par with bacon, but the end result every bit as
delicious. And there was something thoroughly satisfying about hoeing into a fat wedge of fennel as you would a steak, pinning it down with your fork as you sawed into it with a knife. Apologies to non-carnivores for the constant mention of meat in what is an entirely vegetarian - vegan even! - recipe. No comparison is necessary. This dish stands on its own - rich, robust, salty, sweet and so, so good.
There are a million reasons not to invite people over for dinner. Your apartment is too small. You don't have enough time. Or nice enough plates. Money for fancy ingredients. Mastery of complex cooking techniques. It doesn't help that the top-rated shows on television at the moment are ones featuring so-called "home cooks" poaching salmon in temperature-controlled olive oil baths, or constructing edible towers strewn with micro-herbs or native berries. If that's your idea of a good time, then great. For me, having people over is about being together, and it should be easy and fun, generous and relaxed. I love to cook but I want to spend time with my guests, not be stuck in the kitchen all night, then into the early hours of the morning with the washing up.
So on Saturday I had some friends over. One of them was a vegetarian. I made pasta. Most of the ingredients I already had on hand (except celery, which I purchased for the grand total of 69 cents), which is the beauty of this particular dish by Israeli-born, London-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi. It's as if he'd came up with it by pulling random grocery items from his fridge and cupboards and throwing them all together. It's a crazy combination of flavours and textures but it works - salty, sweet, crunchy, soft, strident, subtle... It takes no time to make, tastes good hot or cold (one of my favourite parts of having people over are the leftovers the next day) and makes everyone happy. Even those who hate raisins... of my four guests, there were two of these, who both enthusiastically dug in for seconds.
