Fennel Wrap-up

On Saturday night, I sat down in the park up the street from me to write this entry. When I opened it up to post it this evening, I realized that I was about to give you two long philosophical rambles in a row. So, I chopped all that crap out, and cut straight to the stuff I needed to say about fennel.


Fennel Tea

It’s easy, and it’s delicious. Half-fill your tea infuser with fennel seeds, steep for ten minutes. (Lightly crush the seeds beforehand for a tea that is more potent, but also more bitter.) You get a light green tea that tastes, more or less, exactly how you’d expect it to taste – pleasantly licorice-flavored. (Remember, I don’t like licorice – one of the things that I like about fennel is that it’s got the same sharp taste, without the cloying sweetness.) It’s nice and sweet without needing sugar, and supposedly promotes the production of breast milk. Mmmm, mmmm! What’s not to like?

Fennel Bread

While I really, really enjoyed the delicious scent and slight twang to the taste buds that the fennel added, I’m not going to bother posting the recipe that I used. Because while it smelled wonderful, and tasted great, its density was approximately equal to a neutron star. Victoria and I were out of all-purpose flour, and so I substituted whole wheat. Apparently, you can’t just substitute whole wheat flour for bread flour. I never claimed to be a good baker.

Anyway, a tablespoon (or two) of whole fennel seeds in a loaf of bread is an amazing addition. I think it would also be great to sprinkle on top of the loaf, like rye seeds, or even to use on a bagel instead of sesame seeds or whatever.

Fennel Mushrooms

The fennel mushrooms were okay, not amazing. Unlike some of the other spices, the fennel flavor really seemed to conflict with the mushroom’s own flavor – it didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t blend in the same way that coriander did, for instance. The mushrooms themselves, however, are getting better and better – Victoria came up with the idea of using a wooden skewer to punch holes in them, and that seems to work perfectly.

Fennel Plant

I just wanted to show everyone a picture of my new fennel plant, Fenwick! It came in the mail last Thursday, and is still a little wilted from its trip. It's recovering nicely, though - Victoria is a good gardener.

Last Friday, the whole plant looked like the yellow, wilted part on the left side; it's been healing up nicely. The whole plant is edible; when it's mature, the leaf-tips will bear fruit - the seeds.

Right now, the plant is tiny. When it ages a bit, it will turn into this:

which is a fairly ugly piece of produce. The bulb at the bottom is kind of neat - it's all those stalks kind of wrapped together, in an odd way. Split it open and you can see it more clearly:

It's easy to see that the bulb is just different stalk-like structures, twined together.


Well, this has been a productive week, or almost week and a half, at this point. Fennel is a phenomenally interesting spice - rich and complex, with a sweetness and a twang to it. It's versatile, widely used, and yet something I knew absolutely nothing about. Which, again, is why I'm doing this.


Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll tell you why I hate your oregano so much.

Sing-Along Blog Act 2: Fennel Pot Pie

Ahem... hmm... uhhhhhhhh......

Pot pie needs work.

I also need to be a little bit more careful about what I say on this blog... apparently both the MPAA and Martha Stewart are among our viewers. They were waiting for me when I pulled the pot pies out of the oven... the pies take a few seconds to cool down...

Martha Stewart threw a car at my head.

Not to worry, though, because I'm...


You people are so friggin' lucky. If I could sing one dang note you'd be suffering through another video blog today. Instead, I'll watch Dr. Horrible for the sixth time and just TELL you about the pot pie. Rather than singing about it.

Oh - one quick note - I was feeling like an idiot, because several people emailed me and told me "I don't know why you're having such a hard time finding fennel, my local grocery store sells it, and it's not a fancy place or anything." Well, it turns out that my local store does, as well. I tend to go shopping on Fridays, which means that I'm just in the early planning stages for the next week when I hit the supermarket. In this case, it wasn't until Sunday that I learned anything about fennel - including the fact that it is often sold as "sweet anise", which it isn't. However, when I was in the store today to buy some supplemental ingredients for the pot pie, I noticed that the store had sweet anise. Bingo!


Okay, so pot pie. Despite what I said earlier, the pot pie actually came out great! (When I said "pot pie needs work", that was in character - I may not be able to sing, but I am such a good actor that I can even act in writing.) The crust definitely does need work, but I made the executive decision earlier today that rather than making my own crust, I was just going to buy one from the store. (Benjamin is having some butt-related issues which are making him fussy, and I threw my back out in some mysterious way... so spending hours making pie crust didn't really seem to be the order of the day.) Even with store-bought crusts, I mangled them almost beyond recognition.

My wife, bless her heart, said that it "looked homemade" when she saw it. It's really, really nice to have a spouse who is willing to turn your incompetence into a virtue. Long story short, I'm pretty much going to be ignoring the crust part of this pie, and just focus on the filling. Chances are you can make a better crust on your own - or at least go to the supermarket, buy one, and not mess it up.


Basically, there are three steps to putting the pot pie together - filling, sauce, crust. The filling can be whatever you want, pretty much - I decided I wanted to get crazy-go-nuts, and used pretty much everything in my fridge. Here is the final list of what I used. The amounts are, unfortunately, approximate. I will tell you, however, that the ingredients I chopped up gave me enough filling to make a grand total of four pies; I only had two crusts, so I might try my hand at making a crust tomorrow.

THE FILLING

1/2 bulb of fennel
2 medium carrots
2 stalks of celery
4 baby yellow potatoes
2 oz white mushrooms
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 chicken breast

6 cups veggie broth

I just edited that list; I halved all the amounts that I put in based on what I actually used. I wound up with about four pies worth of ingredients, and did my cooking in two batches; the second batch is still in the fridge, waiting to be put in a crust. So, what I've given you above is a good estimate of the amount of ingredients needed to make two pies. Note that I made one vegetarian, one chicken - so that amount of chicken went into a single pie. If you want to make two chicken pot pies, you might want to increase the amount of chicken.

All of the above were chopped fairly roughly - no huge chunks, but I didn't need them minced, either. While you're chopping, get the broth up and simmering.

All of the stuff above is going to get cooked in the broth - but not everything needs to be in for the same length of time. I'm not going to claim that what I did was anything but guesswork, based on other things that I read along the way, but it seemed to work.

First, in went the fennel and potatoes, for seven minutes. Then, I threw in the mushrooms, carrots, and celery; if you're not planning on doing a veggie pie you can throw in the chicken at this point as well. Give that stuff another five minutes, then throw in the frozen ingredients - the peas and corn. Give the whole shebang another five minutes, and then strain out the good stuff from the broth. If you're planning on cooking more, reserve the broth; I wound up reusing mine twice by the end of the evening.


THE SAUCE

5 tbsp butter
5 tbsp all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups whole milk
3 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp whole fennel seeds
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp ground coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

As I often do, this pot pie recipe isn't so much 'mine' as an amalgamation of about five different ones that I read through before making this. The sauce, however, is pretty much lifted from this recipe here, so credit where it's due. I started making the sauce when I had just tossed the last ingredients in to the broth, and the timing worked out fine.

We're making a thick, creamy sauce to fill up the empty space in the pie. This sauce is eventually going to get all of the rest of the ingredients you're cooking in the broth mixed in with it, so don't make the mistake I did - you're going to need to use a larger pan for the sauce than for the broth.

Get the butter melted on medium low heat, and toss in the garlic, fennel seeds, and coriander. (This is an application where I don't mind using fennel seeds; I don't think that they're going to raise eyebrows in a chunky pot pie. At the same time, after tasting the results, I might add in a tablespoon of ground fennel as well, to up the ante a bit.) Give it a few stirs, then start slowly whisking in the flour. (For those that don't know, this is called a roux; if you just try to thicken a sauce by tossing flour into it, you get big chunks of flour. Making a roux avoids that.) Eventually, you're going to have something which is almost like a dough; that's when you start adding the milk in. Again, add it slowly, whisking all the while.

After about five minutes, the milk will thicken up. (I couldn't for the life of me tell whether the roux simple took a while to dissolve, or if it was dissolving and then something else was happening afterwords.) While you're waiting for that to happen, go back to the veggies and drain off the broth, coming back to the sauce every once in a while to check that it's thickening. (It didn't feel thick enough to me during the first batch, so I added in another tablespoon of flour. That might have been unnecessary.) Once it's thickened, toss in the lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Give the whole shebang a final mix or two; the sauce should be almost as thick as pancake batter - it should stick to the whisk but slowly drip off. When you're there, toss in the filling ingredients, and stir the whole thing until the sauce is completely coating everything else.



THE CRUST

Like I said, I'm not really going to go into the crust too much. Once you've got the sauce made, pour it into the crust, close it up, and put it in the oven at 375 for about 40 minutes. Make sure to let it cool for a while before you serve it - the thick sauce in there is going to be mouth napalm when it comes out of the oven.


I really enjoyed making this, and pot pie is something that I don't really eat enough of. I strongly encourage you to read this post for the process, but not for the specifics; the filling can really be just about anything that your little heart desires. I can definitely see cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini, shrimp, or any of a hundred other things going really well in there (and frankly, I can't really believe that I didn't add onion.) I would take an educated guess that I wound up with slightly more than five cups, total, of filling, so if you aim for around there you should be in the right ballpark whatever stuff you choose to use. I don't think I had a particular reason for using frozen peas and carrots rather than canned; I must have read a recipe that called for them, and decided to go that way.

I wouldn't be afraid of over-spicing this; as I said, I feel like I could have added another tablespoon of fennel - or more - to good effect. All in all, I'm surprised at how well this came out, for something fairly complex that I've never done before; I really expected, for whatever reason, for the whole thing to turn into an utter disaster. It was much, much easier than I expected, and I strongly recommend that you try it at some point.

I actually have no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. Anyone have any bright ideas? Anyone know any good recipes for soups that use fennel?

Aaron's Sing-Along Stuffed Shells

There aren't a whole lot of talents that I feel like I am missing.

Maybe I should rephrase that in a way that makes me sound like less of an arrogant prick.

In general, I'm happy with the talents that I have, and don't often feel like I wish I could do the many, many things I'm bad at. It would be nice to be able to draw, no doubt, and I have to admit that skiing looks like something I might enjoy if I was able to do it more on those wooden plank-things they give you and less on, you know, my face.

There is one huge exception to this - I really, really wish that I could sing. I'm not even asking for rock-star level talent... not that I wouldn't take it, if offered. Is there any better job than Rock Star? (Okay, Hugh Hefner. That job is already filled, though.) I would settle for being able to play Rock Band with my friends and not being forced to relegate myself to Beastie Boys or other mostly atonal spoken-word songs. I would settle for being able to understand the connection between what's going on with my voice, and what's going on with the pitch arrow on the screen. (I find that stupid arrow incredibly frustrating - not because it's always telling me I'm failing the song, but because I honestly don't have the slightest clue what it wants me to do. I've tried just about everything I know how to do with my voice, and it doesn't seem to impact how I do at the game one bit.)

But my loss is your win, folks. Today was our anniversary, and one of the things Victoria got me was the DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you haven't seen it... Who am I kidding? You've seen it. You're reading this, which means you and I have probably hung out. If you look at the Venn diagram of "people who are willing to hang out with Aaron" and "People who have seen Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog", I'm pretty sure that you'll find the first circle is entirely within the second.

So anyway, it's a terrific DVD - and one of the things about a 45-minute movie is that you can actually watch and enjoy the commentary tracks on them. There are two - one normal, and one called "Commentary: The Musical", which was more awesome in theory than in actual practice, but still fairly awesome. Great making-of stuff, a few fun (and fiendishly hard to get at) easter eggs.

I think you know where I'm going here, because you know I'm about as impressionable as warm silly putty.

My complete lack of any ability whatsoever to sing is the only thing that's saving you from having to listen to me singing this blog post. Maybe watch me dancing around in some sort of evil chef costume. OH MY GOD YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I WISH I COULD SING RIGHT NOW.


Grump grump. I feel like I felt during my Hulk post - I mean, I made some stuffed shells, they were really yummy, I'm going to write about them. I'm good at writing! I enjoy writing! But I really, really want to be singing about them. Oh well. Picture me, walking sadly off camera, whistling Sweet Georgia Brown.


I like making stuffed shells. They occupy this odd headspace for me - my mental filing system at once tags them as "fancy" and "homey", two things which should be pretty much at odds with one another. They are kinda fancy - it's hard to argue that a tray of hand-stuffed pasta is anything but - and they're one of the dishes that I'll make for company when I want to serve something nice. At the same time, they're not so much trouble that I can't make them for a family dinner, and it's hard to argue that something which is pasta, cheese, and sauce is anything but comfort food. Plus, my mom made them when we were kids.

The fennel definitely works here. It really did its job, adding a nice zing to the shells without really overwhelming any of the other flavors. I was originally intending to scratch-make a fennel-heavy tomato sauce to go with it (and give me another blog post)  but honestly, I'm glad I didn't - the sauce is a compliment here, not a main element like it would be with, let's say, lasagna. Every time I make stuff shells, I keep meaning to cut back on the amount of sauce I use, but I never remember to - and adding a bunch of fennel straight to the sauce would bring it more into the forefront than I think would really work.

(I still might make sauce - I haven't done that in a long, long time and it's a lot of fun. We'll see if I have time for an all-day cooking project in the next day or so.) (PS I won't have time, so if you see a post where I do tomato sauce, call child services to come and take my neglected child away from me.)

Fennel Stuffed Shells

1 box jumbo stuffed shells1 handful shredded mozzerella
Most of a can of pasta sauce

Filling:
1 lb (about two cups) ricotta cheese
1/2 cup parmesan[1] cheese
4 cloves garlic
1-2 tablespoons ground fennel[2] (I cooked this with one, and I would have liked more.)
1/2 tablespoon basil
1 large egg
6 oz spinach
6 oz mushrooms

1 pinch kosher salt
Dried red pepper flakes to taste


You know how to make pasta, so I'm not going to bother with instructions for the shells. As with most pasta that's getting baked, you want it fairly al dente.

Meanwhile, chop the hell out of the spinach, mushrooms, and garlic. There's not much more to it; dump everything listed under "filling" in a big bowl and mix it together. You may want to beat the egg for a few seconds first, but it's not a big deal if you don't. In the end, you should have a fairly consistent, fairly smooth filling that fairly easily spoons out.

Put the oven on 350. Take out a large baking dish, and put a layer of tomato sauce in the bottom. Hopefully, you've timed this right and your pasta is just about cooked. I generally don't rinse pasta after cooking it, but this is an exception - I run the shells under cold water to cool them down, because we're about to handle them. Now, take the shells one at a time in the palm of your hand - so that the tips of the shell are pointed at your wrist and your fingertips. Gently squeeze the shell with your fingers, so that the edges of the shell (which are probably currently curled in) bow outwards, and the whole thing is wide open.

Damn it, I need to take more pictures. This is something which would be easy to show, but is hard to explain. Oh well, you're smart, you'll figure it out. Squeeze the shell in your hand until it opens up. Take a spoonful of the filling, load up the shell, put the shell in the sauce, and repeat with the next shell. Don't go crazy - it's better to slightly understuff the shells than overstuff them, both from the perspective of managing the amount of filling you have (can always add more later) and from a taste perspective. (I think too much ricotta does more harm than good in both shells and lasagna.)

When you are out of shells, or filling, or hopefully both (if you run out of dish, just go and get a second dish. Do I have to tell you everything?) give the whole thing a bit more tomato sauce on the top of the shells, then give it the mozzarella on top of the sauce. (You could probably dust with some more fennel at this point, too - wish I had thought of that.) Put some tin foil on the top, give it twenty minutes in the oven, take the foil off, give it ten more minutes. Give it ten or fifteen minutes to cook and set before serving; serve with garlic bread, red wine, and your fanciest bon mots. Under no circumstances, while serving these shells, inadvertently introduce your archnemesis to the girl of your dreams.



Tomorrow, I try to make pot pies. Tune in to see if I screw them up!


Actually, that should probably be "Tune in to see how badly I'm gonna screw them up."


[1]I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but in almost any case where I claim to be using parmesan, it's actually a parmesan/asiago/romano blend that Victoria and I get. It's really good.


[2]A quick addendum to my irritated "Why would you want to grind spices more or less finely" post the other day. There's an advantage to buying things in seed form, in that you only need to store the seeds and you can grind it whenever. But I bought not only fennel seeds, but some very finely ground fennel - almost a powder. Way finer than I can grind at home with the tools I currently have. And one thing I really like about it is that it is phenomenally easy to control; it's really, really easy to take a good-sized pinch and then put exactly as much as you want exactly where you want it.

Then again, Alton is always saying that control is one reason that he likes coarse Kosher salt. So, I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

Oh, one last thing - keep in mind that the more finely ground your spice is, the more spice and the less air you're getting in the same volume.

Not your mom's grilled cheese

Cooking grilled cheese today reminds me of making eggs, in that I took a food that I vaguely remember my mom making when I was a kid, tried making it, failed, refined, tried again, failed, refined… and succeeded. (This would be a crappy post without that last part.)

(Remind me to tell you some day about the first time I ever scrambled eggs.)

I mean, grilled cheese, right? Not that difficult. But making easy things difficult is really one of my best qualities. Take a simple, ancient food, add a stubborn insistence to ignore the thousands of years worth of culinary development, and poof! A recipe for lousy grilled cheese sandwiches. Until, of course, you get a recipe for good ones.

Now, by good, I’m talking about good for a refined, adult palate. I somehow doubt that in three or four years, my son is going to be clamoring for the sandwiches I just made for lunch. That’s actually one of the biggest things that I’m worried about happening in the next few years; I’m not sure if kids just naturally gravitate towards bland food, or if they can be taught away from it. Even if it’s natural, I’m going to be a bit hurt when Benjamin wants to go out for McDonald’s rather than have one of my homemade burgers.

One of the reasons that I came to grilled cheese the hard way is that the two main ingredients – white bread and American cheese – are things I tend to run away from kicking and screaming. Actually, that paints a poor picture of me. How about this – I tend to run towards them kicking and screaming, as I run towards all of my enemies. White bread? Seriously? I will quote the Belgian superhero Éclair:

“I too have been sorely disappointed by the quality of baked goods in this country. The bread is bleached, soaked in chemicals… flavorless!”

When you have to go through a second chemical process to replace the nutrients that your first chemical process removed, well, maybe you should reconsider exactly what you’re doing. One of the smartest things that has ever come out of Rich’s mouth was the statement that, with good pizza, toppings are a nicety, not a requirement – if you can’t imagine sitting down and just loving a slice of plain pizza, you’re ordering from the wrong place. (Or are not in the New York area.) Since then, to be honest, I’ve eaten a lot more plain pizza. I feel the same way about bread – bread should be something you’re willing to snack on. As a snack. Without jelly or butter or hummus or any of those accoutrement. If that sounds gross to you, start buying better bread.

American cheese, or any of the various process cheeses, do not get nearly as much of my scorn. (Nota bene - process cheese, not processed cheese.) (Nota even more bene – actually, I’m wrong there. “Processed” is a label which can be applied to a wide variety of cheeses. American cheese is a “pasteurized process cheese”. In other words, the label is not telling you that it has been processed, but that it was created via the pasteurization process, as defined by 21 CFR 133.169(e)(2)(ii). I had thought that processed vs. process was simply one of those mistakes that people make – like saying daylight savings time instead of daylight saving time – but it turns out that they’re interchangeable.)

The thing is, even though processed cheeses have been through as many horrors as the bleached, enriched flour in white bread, there’s at least some kind of point to them. I’m not talking about “extended shelf life”, either – if something can’t support simple forms of life like mold, I have a hard time believing it’ll support complex forms of life like bloggers. But cheese, when heated enough, doesn’t melt smoothly – the fat will melt off, and what’s left will be a blob of protein. Not that I mind, 95% of the time. But there are some applications where you want that piece of cheese to just play nice and melt itself smoothly over something. Cheese fries, for one, and burgers for another. While I love, and have used, swiss, bleu, cheddar, and provolone on burgers, nothing looks quite as perfect as a burger that has a form-fitting comforter of gooey American cheese keeping it warm.

Oh, and when I say horrors, I do mean horrors. Do you know how we get those big blocks of Kraft singles? I had assumed that they started life as a single block, then got machine-sliced and wrapped. Nope – the wrapping comes first, and the molten cheese is poured into it. It is then sealed and left to become the mold for the cheese as it solidifies. While I recognize that many of the foods I eat are created by industrial processes, it’s just hard to stomach the idea that injection molding is one of them. In any case, when you’re buying American cheese, get it at the deli counter. Just like everything else in life, there are various levels of quality.

(Check out 21 CFR 133 someday. You actually have to jump through hoops to be able to call your product “pasteurized process cheese.” If you’re not careful, you’re going to wind up being a “pasteurized process cheese food”. Recently, the FDA warned Velveeta and Kraft that they weren’t even meeting that standard, and in response some items got relabeled “cheese product” or “cheese snack”. Neither of those labels are regulated by the FDA. Run.)

Gooeyness is also an issue – I mean, cheddar melts, as long as you’re careful and don’t let it separate, but it never really gets gooey, not in the way that American cheese gets. For a cheese steak, or cheese fries, gooeyness is a quality you really want to see. The same is true with grilled cheese sandwiches.

Let’s be honest – grilled cheese is a fun food. Grilled cheese reminds us of being kids. It’s not just that it’s something our moms used to make for us, it’s the fact that the American cheese made it gooey and melty and messy and delicious, that it reminds us of a time that we didn’t mind if we spent half the meal with a string of cheese running down from the corner of our mouths to our beards and down onto our shirts, while she looks on with increasing disgust but doesn’t say anything and then never calls again.

Not… not that I’m saying that’s ever been an issue for me. I’m just saying, grilled cheese. Gooeyness. Fun.

So, the design parameters of NYM (Not Your Mom’s) grilled cheese are: Good bread, gooey cheese, appealing to adult palate. I will readily admit that this is nothing like the grilled cheese of memory – but try it. I think you’ll like it.

NYM Grilled Cheese

Bread: Any sandwich loaf. I used a fairly small, brown, whole-grain loaf sliced into 12mm slices. (I have to admit, I like that the local supermarket has a slicer that deals with actual numbers, rather than vagaries like “sandwich slice” or “thick-cut”.)
Cheese: 150 grams (about 1/3 pound) of brie, rind on or off at your whim.
1 Avocado, cut into thin slices
Ground fennel
Butter (about half a stick, total.)

Makes six sandwiches

Get a frying pan (or griddle, or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Butter should melt and sizzle, but not brown immediately. I always screw this up – the first sandwich I make out of any batch is always a little bit burnt. I’m the same way with pancakes. So, actually, let me rewrite this, with that in mind.

Get a frying pan (or griddle or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Throw in a pat of butter, and let it coat the pan. It should melt and start browning pretty immediately. Turn the heat down to slightly below medium – I think I had my stove top set to four out of ten. Take a paper towel and lightly wipe down the pan. Your goal is to get up the burned-ness and make sure the pan is nice and evenly coated. Now, throw in a second pat of butter. This one should melt fairly quickly, but not brown quite as quickly. This one you don’t want to swirl around – you want a buttery mess in the middle of the pan.

THE BREAD: Toss two pieces of bread right into the middle of the butter, and give the whole thing about two minutes to fry up. Take some tongs and flip the bread – they should be lightly-toasted and glistening. After you flip them, move them around in the pan a bit so that they soak up any of the extra butter.

THE CHEESE: Brie is a pain in the ass to work with. It is soft and sticky – I strongly suggest, if you don’t have one, getting a cheese knife. Honestly, I use ours maybe twice a year, and I’m still glad I have it. Peeling slices of brie off of a regular knife is a phenomenally irritating process. You can pick a cheap one up for ten dollars.

I had a wedge of brie, which I truncated about a third of the way down, so I could make nice-sized slices. I didn’t bother cutting the rind off – I think maybe I should have gone through the bother, but it’s purely personal taste. This left me with the problem that my slices got larger and larger the more I made. For the first two sandwiches, I would use two slices of cheese per piece of bread; for the next two, I wound up using one big slice from the main piece, and a slice from the small triangle I had cut off. For the last two sandwiches, I was pretty much using one slice of cheese per slice of bread. Actually, that also gives you an idea of how big the loaf of bread that I was using was – I was covering slightly more than two thirds of each slice of bread with cheese. Brie can quickly get overwhelming – the first time I tried it on grilled cheese, I plastered the sandwich with it, and wound up making myself sick to my stomach. So, go light on the cheese.

Once the bread is fried on one side, throw the cheese on. You really want to get the cheese down as soon as possible – the leftover heat should be doing as much work to melt the cheese as the heat coming up from the pan. With other kinds of cheese, I wouldn’t mind if some gooped over the side, but 1. brie is expensive and 2. the brie didn’t wind up melting down the side of the sandwich, the pieces that were dangling just kind of detached themselves and fell into the pan. (I fished them out and threw them on top of the sandwich, though, so THAT was okay.)

THE FENNEL: So last week, with coriander, I had a feeling that this wasn’t really working – that I didn’t really get a feel for coriander. When I was making this, I got the exact opposite feeling. Sometimes I’m definitely shoehorning the spice of the week into a recipe, and figuring out later whether or not it was a good idea. The day before, Victoria had asked if I wouldn’t mind making lunch for some friends of hers who were coming over for the afternoon. I decided on grilled cheese, wondered if I could fit fennel in somehow, and then realized that fennel would be great in this recipe. And guess what? It was.

After the cheese had gotten a little melty and sticky, I put a healthy-sized pinch of fennel on top of each piece of bread. Well, to be honest, that’s what I did about a third of the time. The other third, I forgot and wound up putting the fennel on after the avocado. I don’t think it really matters much, except it’s easier to judge how much of the (green) fennel is going on the (white) brie rather than the (slightly different green) avocado.

THE AVOCADO: The avocado I was using was not quite as ripe as I would have liked, so while I was cooking up the bread, I also gave the avocado a few minutes to toast up in the butter mixture. I have no idea if “frying in butter” does anything even vaguely chemically similar to ripening, but it definitely made it softer and tastier. Which, if I remember my chemistry, is what happens when you… fry things in butter. So that was a win/win situation.

(How neat! I just read on Internet that you can force-ripen an [unopened] avocado by running it through the dishwasher. That, at once, sounds like it couldn’t possibly work, and sounds like it absolutely should work. This sounds like a job for science!)

Take a slice or two of avocado, and press it down into the cheese, which should be ever so slightly sticky. (It hasn’t had much time to absorb heat, yet.) You now have three choices – you can put avocado on every other slice of bread, and flip them over into sandwiches so that the cheese will stick them together. You can put avocado on every slice of bread, and serve them as open-faced sandwiches. Or, you can put avocado on every slice and still turn them into sandwiches, which means that your sandwich sides will not adhere quite as well. If you’re an avocado fiend like Victoria and I are, you’ll probably choose the third option.

THE SANDWICH: You want to give the second side of the bread about two minutes, total, from the time you flip it to the time you make it into a sandwich. It’s going to take significantly more heat than the first side, so you really don’t want to overdo things.

The thing you’re really looking for is stickiness. You’re going to take your tongs and flip one piece of bread over on to another one. If you haven’t covered every slice in avocado, you can do that pretty easily, but if you HAVE covered every slice in avocado, you want to make sure that the avocado isn’t immediately going to slide off the sandwich. Pick up one slice of bread in your tongs, flip over on to the other side, and press down. The traditional method at this point is to take a small plate, put it on top of the sandwich, and apply a bit of pressure. You want a bit of compression, but not all the cheese squeezed out onto the pan. Give it a minute – less if you smell burning – remove the plate, flip, put the plate back, and give it another minute. Now, put the sandwich on top of the plate, cut in half (if that’s your preference) and serve.


I think that you’ll agree, this is pretty far from your mother’s grilled cheese sandwich. But you know what? It’s simple, it’s delicious, and it’s good gooey fun. Also, for reasons I don’t claim to understand, surprisingly good at impressing the ladies without earning stern looks from one’s wife.

What? What's wrong with that?


Also - I hope I didn't imply that my mom makes anything except the most awesome grilled cheese. Your mom, too, I'm sure. This is just something different.

There's fennel for you

Sometimes I feel like half of the things I write are just inside jokes that nobody but me is in on. That is not, as the sages say, a good way to rock and roll.

"There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb o' grace o' Sundays..." Ophelia, Hamlet IV:V

Fennel is an anomaly, at least thus far in my education - it is a a plant which we use as an herb, a spice, and a vegetable. Unlike coriander - whose herbal elements are so different from its spice...al.... elements that we call them by different names - fennel is just fennel. The leaves and the seeds don't have identical tastes, but they're variations on a theme rather than different flavor; you can substitute fennel seeds for fennel leaf in the exact same way you cannot substitute coriander for cilantro.

This week, I'm going to be focusing on fennel seeds. To be perfectly honest, my spice store doesn't sell the herbal form of fennel, and I couldn't find any at my local grocery store. I'm going to try to hit Whole Foods this week, and see if they've got it, but I'm not hopeful - I can't even find a place online that sells it. ("Outside of France, it is hard to get the dried fennel greens...") I just placed an order for a whole damn fennel plant - I'm somewhat dubious about what the odds of a plant surviving a trip through the USPS are, but what the hell. 

I'm not going to bother with the vegetable form, fennel bulb, because it's, well, a vegetable, not a spice. There is one more form you can get fennel in, as well - fennel pollen, which as far as I can tell is basically a super-potent form of the ground seed, which makes sense. It's pretty expensive - about ten times as expensive as the seed - which also makes sense. And, I don't see any real reason to bother with it, which is the third thing in a row which makes sense. Seriously, what's with things making sense all of a sudden.

Speaking of things making sense, Fennel has an extensive mythological history. Prometheus used the stalk of the fennel plant to carry stolen fire down from Mount Olympus. Why fennel? Well, giant fennel - not the kind we eat - is kind of a natural tiki torch. Its stalks can grow as large as fifteen feet tall, and it burns slowly. In other words, it was something that the ancient Greeks who wrote the myths actually used as torches. Way to spoil the magic, guys.

Dionysos had a staff which was a long, thick fennel stalk tipped with a pine cone. Hur, hur. Subtle, Dion. Grow up.

In Greek, fennel is called "marathon", and the city, the battle, and the subsequent type of foot-race all derive from this plant which used to grown in that area of Greece.

The ancient Egyptians considered fennel to be an aphrodisiac, which probably wasn't too far from the mark. Fennel has a fresh, licorice-like smell and taste; in modern India, people crunch fennel seeds after meals as breath freshener. And anyone will tell you that you're much more likely to get some action with fresh breath than without. Also in modern times, the Hippies use fennel in their toothpastes, but that just goes to show.

In the middle ages, fennel was hung over the door to ward off the devil, and fennel seeds placed in keyholes to keep ghosts from coming through them. Those people were, to be frank, idiots. Honestly, while the ghost thing makes sense - fennel smells really good, and any decent ghost would probably just sit in the keyhole, sniffing the fennel - how is fennel going to keep the devil out? Is he really likely to just take the fennel and go home and cook? Greece is really close to hell - back in those days, Greek heroes came and went all the time - so the devil has a ready source of high-quality fennel. Anyway, everyone knows the devil cooks almost exclusively with various hot sauces of his own infernal devising, and if you want to keep him away, you've got to hang wild garlic, which he can't really get down in hell.


I already mentioned that fennel has a very licorice-y taste. I actually don't like licorice at all, which spins my taste buds into confusion when I taste fennel. I'm pretty sure I really like it, but the fact that it tastes like licorice means that when I'm tasting it, I'm being reminded of something that I don't like. My working theory is that there are parts of the taste I identify as licorice that I like - but those parts are overwhelmingly strong. (Liquorice root itself contains a natural sugar fifty times sweeter than sucrose.) Fennel includes those tastes that I enjoy, but without the cloying taste of liquorice itself. (Or, in the case of twizzlers, the always-wonderful flavors of potassium sorbate and partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)

I've read fennel described as "anise-like" several times in the last few hours, but that's just dumb to me. Anise is a less-used spice than fennel, and a less common taste (at least among people I've met) than licorice... so unless the purpose is pure snobbery, why would you describe it using a term that people are less likely to be familiar with?

Fennel, Liquorice, and Anise - A Taster's Guide

Liquorice, the plant, is most commonly tasted in licorice, the candy - at least the variant we call "black licorice". Which is funny, because red licorice is simply a twisted candy rope, usually with cherry or strawberry flavor, made to look like licorice candy. But it's not actually flavored with any licorice, nor is it supposed to be. So "black licorice" is really just "licorice". And now the word "licorice" has lost all meaning, and I can't even tell if I'm spelling it right any more. I hate that.

Anise is the spice that gives its flavor to Sambuca, as well as Anis/Anisette, Ouzo, Raki, and a whole variety of other horrible, horrible liquors, depending on what country you're currently in. Star anise is an unrelated herb that tastes a lot like anise but is much cheaper, and so is often substituted. (It also has really cool star-shaped pods.)

Fennel is most commonly tasted as the primary spice in sweet Italian sausage.

None of these plants have any particularly close botanical relationship. What they do have in common is the organic compound para methoxy phenyl propene, or anethole, which is the common flavor that links all of them. Anethole is also extremely sweet - thirteen times as sweet as sugar - though not nearly as sweet as glycyrrhizin, the super-sweet sugar in liquorice. Anethole interacts with water oddly; it creates something called a microemulsion. Without making myself sound like an idiot by trying to explain chemistry I don't understand at all, I'll say it the easy way. When you pour a drink containing anethole into water, it clouds up. This is called the "ouzo effect", after the drink that it's most commonly seen in. However, it is also a characteristic of the anise liquors' sexy older cousin, absinthe. Absinthe is primarily flavored with three herbs - wormwood, which everyone knows, but also anise and fennel.

It's been a really long time since I've had absinthe, and I have to say, my reaction to it was pretty much the same as my reaction to sambuca, ouzo, and raki - disgust. However, since it's got fennel in it, I am willing - for your sake, dear reader - to see if my wonderful local liquor store has any of the new breed of absinthes that have been distilled since US law deregulated it a few years ago.


I want to go back to my music metaphor, because I've had one thought in my head the whole time I've been cooking with fennel. I've been comparing spices to instruments, to their roles in a band, but fennel is a person. Specifically, Clyde Stubblefield. I feel like I don't really know enough about either music or spices to make that claim, but there it is. Clyde Stubblefield was James Brown's drummer, and - no disrespect meant to the Godfather of Soul - probably is the hardest working man in show business. You've heard Stubblefield's drums a thousand times, even if you've never actually listened to James Brown, because his beat are considered the epitome of funky drumming (for a good example, see "The Funky Drummer") and he's been sampled more than anyone else on Earth.


Fennel makes me feel like I'm a young DJ, making my first record. I'm a kid, I'm just starting out, and I just heard this awesome drum beat on a CD my older brother gave me. I want to use it in everything - it's just so good, so fresh and unique. I want to share it with everyone - I want to be known as the guy who first understood how awesome this thing is, who first shared it with the world.

Hoo, boy, am I in for some disillusionment. Still, here's the thing about something that good - my record may not be as original or unique as I think, but it's still going to be good. As MC Frontalot says, you can always wring another single out of old Clyde Stubblefield. And over the next few days, I'm going to show you - with breathless excitement - a few recipes that really highlight the flavor and uniqueness of this spice.

Try not to laugh, okay?