Some of the most deeply satisfying pleasures of our tables are found when, as Thoreau encouraged, we drink the drink and taste the fruits of each season as it passes. As the warmth of late-summer air slides into the crisp chill of autumn, both apples and fennel come into their natural seasons.
Apple is one of the iconic flavors of fall, beloved for its juicy, crisp, sweet-tart essence. Some are more sweet, like Red and Golden Delicious and Jonagold. Others, like Granny Smith, Jonathan and Northern Spy, are more tart. And some, like Empire, Smokehouse and Honeycrisp, offer a wonderful balance of sweet and tart.
Though beloved in Italy, the taste of fennel graces American tables infrequently except as a seasoning in Italian-style sausage. It deserves more attention. It’s texture is crisp like celery. Underneath its dominant anise-like flavor, it offers a slight sweetness and the underlying coolness of menthol. When combined with apple, it evokes autumn as surely as smoke against the coolness of a fall cornfield.
While fennel and apple can be baked, braised or added as components to any number of dishes, fennel and apple salad, in several forms, allows any home cook—from the stressed soccer parent trying to place a mid-week meal on the table to the cook preparing for an elegant Sunday supper—to bring this autumnal combination to the table easily and quickly.
Mark Bittman, renowned food writer whose mission is “to get people cooking simply, comfortably, and well,” recommends a simple chopped salad as one of three basic techniques which can draw anyone into the kitchen and beyond the realm of canned soups, frozen pizza and bologna sandwiches, even in the midst of the most harried of schedules. The necessary tools are few: a surface on which to cut and a knife. The technique is simple: chop or slice as suits your fancy at the moment. The time involved is short: a home cook with average knife skills can have this chopped salad on the table in about 15 minutes.
Once you’ve tried a chopped salad, it is easy to use those chopped apples and fennel as components in your favorite green salad.
And when you are in need of an elegant presentation that evokes the feeling of autumn, julienne cut them as a garnish for a simple poached white fish or two of autumn’s most-delightful Sunday dinners, roast chicken and roast pork loin.
Full the full recipe of Chopped Salad of Apple and Fennel, click here. For a guide to sourcing local apples and fennel, click here.
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