When I worked on the book, The Chef’s Garden, chef Jamie Simpson created intricate recipes using multiple parts of a plant. All of them are works of art. But, most of them, you wouldn’t make for Tuesday night dinner.
Still, I like to bring Jamie’s way of looking at vegetables into my cooking when possible.
The salad here relies on a variety of fennel grown for its snowy white swollen stem. It can become so fat, cooks refer to the stem as a bulb. Seed catalogs often call this variety Florence fennel, but in my grocery store, they sell it as anise.
Whatever you call it, it’s one of my favorite vegetables. I often slice up a “bulb” to munch on before dinner — its juicy crunch and whisper of anise flavor make it the perfect booze-free aperitif.
Now that it’s March and spring is nigh, this is the season for a classic Sicilian-style orange and fennel salad.
To pump up that anise-flavor a bit more, I make a toasted fennel seed oil and spoon half into the salad and the other half over a medium-rare steak. (The feathery leaves, called “fronds,” make up the third part of the “triple fennel salad”.)
The cut of steak you use here doesn’t matter too much. I often recommend sirloin if you want to keep costs down and New York strip if you feel like splurging. I prefer to purchase grass-finished beef.
My supermarket also sells Piedmontese beef, which an environmental-scientist-turned-beef farmer said is a great choice because the animals put on weight faster than other breeds and produce exceptionally tender meat even on a complete grass diet.
The recipe here requires a bit of time at your cutting board with a knife to break down fennel and neatly slice up the oranges. But once you do that, the rest of the recipe comes together fast.
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