Fresh Produce of the Month: Fennel -- Roundup

Hello everyone! Quite an easy roundup this time: only two recipes :) Oh well, I guess fennel is not in season very much anywhere, although I did see it listed as one of the in-season ingredients on a few websites. Anyway, here are links to..

Simona's really nice 'Fennel and leek soup with fennel greens': as she said, "a deeply flavored soup that will enchant your palate". And she grated her own homemade cheese on top!






And my 'Fennel and lamb curry', a pairing that I found out to be common in Italian cuisine and never tried before. I added some spices to make it more curry-like, et..voila' :) A really delicious meal was ready.






For the next event, I have actually looked quite extensively on at least the US peak season map that you can find at epicurious.com.. and have chosen.. rhubarb! I actually really would have wanted to have strawberries, but we already had a FPOM dedicated to this fruit, so I thought about its less known companion of the famous strawberry-rhubarb pie. There is a reason if the two are paired: they are both in season at a similar time!
(Image from wikimedia.com)

So I hope this time many will join in the fun, and will follow these simple rules:

1. Publish a post on your blog with a recipe involving rhubarb. Add a link to this announcement and mention that it's an entry for the Fresh Produce of the Month event. Feel free to place the logo on your post.
2. Send me an email with a link to your post, your blog homepage and your name at chemcookitATgmailDOTcom. Specify 'Fresh Produce of the Month: Rhubarb' as subject. A photo is optional, though helpful.
3. If you don't have a blog just send me an email with your recipe and, if you have a picture of the food you made, that's great: I will add it to the roundup as well.

The deadline for entry submission is May 29th, 2009. I will post the roundup soon after.

Note: If you don't receive an answer to your email or a comment on your post within two days of sending me the email, please contact me again: sometimes email messages get lost in cyberspace.

Agnello al finocchio

Hrm.... Once again, I'm late on posting the recipe for my own blog event.... Probably not too bad, though: so far I didn't receive any submissions! I guess fennel is not in season in many parts of the world. So, this is a good occasion to send out a reminder to anybody who could be interested in participating.
You can find the rules for submission here. And, the deadline is now officially extended till April 25!

So here is the fennel-centered dish that I made tonight. I thought about the pairing of lamb and fennel after reading a few online recipes on cooker.net, and I decided to add some spices to the dish to make it curry-like. It turned out quite good. I wonder if there are any real Indian curries using fennel as a vegetable.

Curry di agnello e finocchio / Fennel and lamb curry
Ingredients
One onion
Three cloves of garlic
Two fennels
One pound lamb, cubed
Half a pound small tomatoes (romanitas)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
1/2 tsp garam masala powder
4 dried spicy chili peppers, cut into pieces
Salt
Pepper

Prepare the ingredients: finely mince the onion, the garlic, cut the white bulb of the fennels in thin slices, separate and finely cut the stems and the leaves, and cut the tomatoes in quarters or halves depending on the size. Dry roast the spices, except for the garam masala powder. Grind them.
Sautee the onion in abundant olive oil and add the ground spices. Add the pieces of lamb and brown, about 7 minutes. Remove the meat from the pan, and add the fennel slices and some salt. Sautee the slices for about 7 minutes, stirring frequently to coat with the oil, onion and spice mixture. Remove from the pan and add the rest of the pieces of the fennel and the tomatoes. Cook for 3 minutes and place the meat back in the pan. Cook for 5 more minutes, add garam masala powder, and salt and pepper to taste. If your pan is large enough, stir in the fennel slices, otherwise assemble the dish by placing the fennel slices and the meat, fennel and tomatoes mixture directly in serving bowls, over some boiled basmati rice.

If you try it, let me know what you think about it. I thought it was quite nice, even though I never had a curry containing fennel.

Giro di vite

Finally, the moment has come. I have officially decided what to do for at least the next few years of my life. As you know, my long absence from blogging was related to job hunting. At last, last Wednesday, I had to make up my mind, and decide among the many really good offers that I received. It was a hard choice, but in the end, the verdict is.. professor in Montreal! I still have trouble visualizing myself as a professor, but hopefully I will be good at it. I will start there in September, so I have a few more months to enjoy the beautiful Bay Area, with its wonderful weather and scenarios.

Anyway, I want this post to be a small photographic summary of some of the wonderful places I visited during this interview period. In particular, I want to share some pictures from Australia, which I visited in February.

First Australian stop: Adelaide

Adelaide is a one million people city, somewhat spread out, with wonderful weather, beautiful hilly surroundings where most of the best Australian wine is produced, and great beaches just a few miles away.
Here you can see some of the nice hills of McLaren Vale..
And one of the wineries: this was a very small family-run winery, producing wonderful wine.
Here are the impressively long beaches near Adelaide, easily reachable by public transportation.
However, maybe what touched me the most in Adelaide were the people. Together with some of the professors of the department I was interviewing at, we went for a tour of the wineries, and then we had dinner altogether, cooking kangaroo meat! Yes, Australians do eat kangaroo meat, and I must admit it's delicious. Read the labels on these sausages if you don't believe me..
These are the 'roo' steaks we made: they taste similarly to beef, but they are amazingly tender.
You can see why it was so hard for me to choose where to go. I think I left part of my heart in Adelaide, and maybe at some point of my life I will decide to go back there.

Second Australian stop: Sydney

Sydney is an amazingly beautiful city. Its charm is hard to pin down, maybe due to its many different facets. Matt and I stayed in Glebe, a very lively neighborhood, with lots of small restaurants.
We loved it, it felt like being in a very genuine part of the city, instead of a typical touristic hub. Here is an example of a beautiful house in Glebe's neighborhood.
Glebe is also very close to the fish market, which is the best fish market I ever saw in my life. Here you can see the port that faces it:
And here is just one of the many stands selling wonderful fish of amazing varieties.
The fish is delicious. We tasted some of it at a small place in Glebe, where we had grilled fish prepared on the spot and fried fish burger and chips for as little as five dollars each.

Of course, the touristic spots have a reason for being so popular, too. The Opera house is an amazing building, that looks like something different from every angle.

Is it a sailing boat?
Or a butterfly?
Or a solemn church?
Or two eyes looking at the horizon?
Or a huge bug?
You pick. :)

Very close to the Opera House is the impressive Sydney bridge. Here you can see it in its beauty from the sea. I took a picture of it while going back from Manly, a beach easily reachable by ferry boat.
People climb on the top of the bridge. Pretty impressive!

Another amazing thing of Sydney is its port. The largest boats in the world go through here, and we had the honor of seeing the Queen Victoria here. It's a cruise ship that holds about 3000 people. Its size is impossible to imagine without seeing it.
The first view we had of it was from far away, and it was a surrealistic scenario, which I hope I captured with this panoramic collage:

We were even more impressed when we realized that we were going to see it depart..
And we got to follow it for a little bit, while going to Manly on our ferry.

Speaking of Manly, there wasn't too much of interest there, except for the fact that Matt succumbed to the Evil Temptation: he bought something at McDonald's!
I must admit, it was a pretty good deal: soft serve for AU$0.30.
One of the most beautiful parts of the Manly trip was the ride back to Sydney at sunset. A number of boats were elegantly sailing back, creating this beautiful show for us:


And here is Sydney skyline at dusk:


Another thing that we really liked of Sydney was how bike friendly it was. There were bike lanes on every bridge. This is the Anzac bridge, which we rode on a few times:
We also took a very beautiful bike ride in the Sydney surroundings, but I have no pictures of it, unfortunately.
I do, however, have pictures of a beautiful and long walk that we took along the coast to get the famous Bondi beach. Here you can see the beach in the distance.
But the most beautiful parts of the walk were the cliffs -- here you can see Matt right after jumping on one of them:
And an amazing, immense cemetery facing the ocean.

To finish this post, a few more fun things.

Australia was great for their coffee. Adelaide in particular was so influenced by Italian immigrants that it was impossible to find brewed coffee: only espresso drinks were made. In Sydney, we had some delicious coffee and cappuccino at a place where they were roasting their own coffee:
The cream was exactly like it's supposed to be: a cream, not a foam like they make all the time in the US!!

Australia was also really funny for the large amount of knock-offs that we found: here is 'Norgen-Vaaz'..
and here is 'Gold Rock' ice cream shops!
(for my non-American readers: these names strangely sound like 'Hagen-Daaz' and 'Cold stone', two very famous ice cream makers in the US).

And finally, here are some pictures of us: me, dreaming about Australian skies
And Matt, with his super cool kangaroo hat.

This is it for now. I hope you enjoyed this Australian picture trip, and I will show something of the other interview places soon. :)