Radish Salad and Fennel Soup
So Ava sends me out with a gigantic shopping list, one that takes me three trips to carry everything up the 64 stairs from the garage to the apartment. I come back on the third trip to find her sitting on the floor in the kitchen, wearing a Jayne hat and scarf, eating the pimento-stuffed green olives while slowly putting the rest of the groceries away in the fridge. See, she had been cleaning the back room earlier, which inevitably leads to the discovery of some forgotten article of clothing.
"Hat!" she will say and put it on. "Scarf!" she will exclaim as she hangs it on her shoulders. And so she assembles an outfit.
She had come back from her holiday trip in England with a cookbook: The Vegetarian Option by Simon Hopkinson. We had sort of fallen in a cooking rut, cooking the same familiar things over and over, so we chose a couple of recipes at random and I went off to the store to find the ingredients for our cream of fennel soup and radish and celery salad.
I'd only started cooking with fennel recently, but it's quickly becoming a favorite. The bulbs taste like licorice; apparently they have the same chemical that gives the flavor.
It's really good chopped and tossed in a salad, but here Ava's chopping them so they can be stewed with onions and potatoes in (her homemade) vegetable stock. The stew is then puréed in a blender before the cream is added.
Radishes for the salad are washed and then chopped.
Ava also made this garlic butter mixture.
Now this butter, I must explain, is one of the most delicious things I have eaten. It is also very strong. By weight the concoction is nearly a tenth garlic; any more and the substance would be chemically unstable. The aura one emits after eating is nearly visible: a vampire and kiss repulsing haze that fills half the room.
I am eating some garlic butter toast as I write this, but the bread is less of a feature and more of a utensil, useful in the way that a spoon is useful when eating soup.
But anyway.
The first part of our meal, a radish, celery, and parsley salad with capers. It was one of those weird salads where any of the parts, by themselves, weren't that fantastic, but together it was really good.
We also sliced a French bread baguette and buttered it with the God's Own Garlic Butter.
The creme of fennel soup was fantastic. The flavor of the fennel was clear and the overall effect wonderfully satisfying. Ava melted a small amount of the butter on the top after serving for that extra kick.
This was so much fun we think we're going to have to spend the afternoon shopping and cooking again. Maybe grander, more ambitious things.