Saturday I went to the Farmer’s market. It has been a warm winter and there has been a lovely crop of greens and cool-season vegetables.
I didn’t actually buy these, although they looked lovely and I may wish otherwise. I bought more carrots, admittedly mostly for the gorgeous greens, which I have chopped, washed and frozen for future soups. i will use the carrots too, probably mostly roasting them and they are handy for flavoring dishes especially soups and stocks, but these are so fresh and young and lovely, then deserve to be eaten and enjoyed, even if they are not my favorite vegetable. Perhaps I am just a greedy person and the carrots are the price I must pay for a love of the greens. Although the thought of a curried carrot soup sounds nice as we face another rainy week.
I also bought fennel. I was having some friends over dinner Sunday night, and thought I would roast the fennel wedges with local garlic and Belgian endive which was not local. I would like to grow some endive, and it might be a worthwhile project considering how much I love endive and its price in the store. I know it is a two-step process. Perhaps next winter I will be able to eat my own home-grown endive. I will have to figure out the frost date and work backward. Even though I have lived in Knoxville for eight years now, I am still a little more vague on the weather than I was in Hyde Park. Having a garden and working in it will tie me more closely to the seasons over time.
But back to the fennel. I knew I was roasting the bulbs, and I also knew, from experience that these local fennel bulbs were often tougher than the tender bulbs often found in grocery stores, so I knew they needed to roast at fairly low to medium heat, allowing them to caramelize slowly, a technique that also works well for both endive and garlic.
But what to do with the rest of the fennel. Look at those gorgeous feathery green fronds. I knew I could cut the stems off and make a batch of broth with them, the basis for a lovely fennel soup, or perhaps even a seafood stew. I had chopped and frozen my stems from my last farmer’s market foray, including the tender green fronds. But somehow these fronds were so generous and so lovely it seemed that turning them into stock would be a waste.
Two weeks ago I made pesto from tender young carrot greens, and it was delicious. I wondered if I could do the same with the fennel. It certainly couldn’t hurt to try. I stripped the tender fronds from the leaves and tossed them into the food processor with a fairly traditional mix of a fruity olive oil and pine nuts. I added a little salt, but later, deciding it needed more, I added some goat milk feta, also made by a local farmer, and it was the perfect thing to round out the flavor.
I was so excited, I had some fennel pesto on a simple plate of scrambled eggs yesterday morning. I might do that again today. Apologies, I was apparently also so eager that I forgot, and took a bite before I took the photo.
This whole process makes me happy, happy to support local farmers, eager to grow and produce some of my own food, even if only a few small bites, happy to use as much as possible of what is offered with less waste. The chicken bones from last night’s dinner are in the freezer waiting to become stock, along with the onion and garlic peels and those aforementioned fennel stalks. Increasingly, it seems that what I think is important, balance and connection, seem tied as much to my relationship to this earth of which I am a part, as it is to other people, who are of course equally a part of this earth. I worry that in our quest for convenience, and in elevating our lives outside of our basic dependence on the very earth of which we are a part, we have lost something essential to ourselves. And of course this adds tension because I live a modern American life and I love my life. Well, life is an evolution after all.
Now if only I can weed myself off ziploc bags. That seems to be a goal worth pursuing, but it is a task that has proven to be more complicated than I initially assumed. A freezer filled with bags of vegetable peels and stems and bones is a testament to that. At least the bags that contain vegetables can be washed and reused. I am not sure that is true for the bags that contain bones.
