Roasted fennel with apples, almonds & blue cheese

July 22, 2023

   

We're still slowly working our way through the recipes that Cindy bookmarked in Josh McFadden and Martha Homberg's Six Seasons, and we took advantage of fennel season to give this fennel bake a crack. It's almost a meal on its own, with sausage, apple, cheese and fennel all combined into a big hearty pile, but we added double-quantity of this Georgian kidney bean salad just to round things out. The fennel bake itself was a winner - we used V2 sausages and they worked nicely to add some salty protein to the dish. The breadcrumbs and almonds added lots of great crunch to the soft, sweet fennel and apple too, but the (quite expensive) cheese we daubed throughout got a bit lost in the final wash-up. The original recipe calls for taleggio, so maybe our creamy blue just didn't have the punch, but I honestly don't think you'd lose much if you skipped the cheese entirely. This definitely feels like a dish we'll make again if we somehow wind up with a bulb of fennel in the house - it's pretty tasty.

 

   

Roasted fennel with apples, almonds & blue cheese

(a slightly adapted recipe from Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg's Six Seasons)

olive oil

1 pack of veggie sausages (400g)

1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes

1 big bulb of fennel (approx 600g)

1 large apple

1/2 cup toasted almonds

1 teaspoon dried thyme

150g creamy blue cheese (or taleggio), torn into little bits

salt and pepper

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

1 tablespoon butter

Pre-heat the oven to 190°C.

Trim the green stalks and root end off the fennel and cut the bulb lengthwise into 8 pieces or so. Peel and thinly slice the apple. 

Break up the sausages into kind of bite-sized pieces and fry in a large frying pan with the olive oil and fennel seeds, for about 5 minutes until lightly browned (this is not an especially crucial step with veggie sausages I expect). Set aside. 

Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the pan along with the garlic and cook it very slowly, for 5 minutes or so until it just starts to brown up. Add the chill flakes and sliced fennel and stir together. Pour in about 1/2 cup of water and over the pan, simmering and steaming the fennel until it softens. Add more water as needed, it took us about 10 minutes to get things pretty soft. 

Stir through the sausage, apple, almonds, thyme and about half of your cheese and season with salt and pepper.

Pour the mix into a baking dish, top with the leftover cheese and the breadcrumbs and dot with the butter. Bake for about 30 minutes, until the breadcrumbs are nice and golden and everything is hot through. 

Leave to rest for 5 minutes and then serve.