Hi fellow Foodies,
Today I wanted to share an interesting recipe that I decided to try out: fennel zucchini soup!
One of the wonderful things about the farms that we support and get our food from via our CSA (community shared agriculture [basically a share of the farms food every week in exchange for paying a lump sum up front if you aren’t familiar with it]) is that we get lots of delicious things coming through and we don’t know exactly what’s going to be in season. This past week it was fennel! If you’ve never tried fennel it’s kind of a sweet licorice flavor to it but it also tastes like anise. It’s a wonderful vegetable and one of my favorites to have since we don’t get it often. When I see it I usually buy it to try and eat it!
I ended up doing a quick internet search to see what I could do with the fresh, delicious fennel. I had bought them before but just ate them raw in salads and stuff but I knew there was more to the plant than just that! Thankfully we also have more zucchini than I know what to do with so we were eager to use up one of those. The recipe I followed is just below this if you’d like to give it a try. The only substitution I had to make was that we don’t currently have any curry spice in the house besides turmeric. I’ll have to fix that! My favorite curry spice was from Trader Joe’s but those jerks took it off the shelves and never brought it back so that was annoying!
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/255024/zucchini-fenchel-suppe-zucchini-and-fennel-soup/
The ingredients you need are:
One of the tools in the kitchen that we got years ago but didn’t use much was this little gem here. It’s a vegetable slicer that will just chop whatever you need into tiny chunks. Perfect for onions, garlic, tomatoes and any other thing that requires a fine chop to it. I definitely needed to use it here. Onions are ones that always get me. I don’t know how vegans kill them all day, do they not cry anymore?! Lol. This made the onion quick work and it let the little man help me as well. Cooking is good but it’s a little tricky when the recipes require fine chops and all that.
While I was doing the chopping, you put the 2 tablespoons of butter in a big pot so that it will melt. You add the onion to the butter and let it cook a bit so that it softens but also enhances the flavor of the onion. I personally don’t know of a recipe with butter that I didn’t like so butter is just awesome!
You then add all of the veggies; the chopped fennel bulb and the sliced zucchini and then the two cups of chicken broth. Now that it was all in the pan it was time to let it cook for a bit. We want all the delicious things to meld together and break down. The butter makes it all taste phenomenal! I think the recipe called for it too cool for 10-15 minutes. Clean up time while that’s cooking!
Once it’s all cooked one of the things you are going to need to do is use an immersion blender if you have one. We love ours, we don’t use it often but when you need it and have it it’s great! It’s helped us in quite a few pickles we’ve been in with recipes lol. Give it a nice blend and you’ll be good to go. One thing to be careful of though is to make sure that you tilt the pan a little bit! The quantity of the recipe doesn’t produce a deep mix so the blender was splattering all over the place until I tipped it a bit to make the mix deeper. Once I did that it was much happier. Less of the “shit that hurt” burns on my arms and hands when the boiling liquid hit me lol.
The last thing to do was to add the spices and vinegar. I usually just add this type of stuff to taste instead of measuring and all that jazz. I can’t tell you how much I used but the vinegar was two teaspoons. Once that’s all in the pot, give it a good mix and get to plating!
The fennel top is then just chopped a little bit to be added on top as a garnish. I enjoyed it as a garnish because it was actually a useful garnish. I get annoyed when they throw a sprig of some shit that just looks nice on top of the food. Give me something I can eat! Lol. This was a delicious recipe and one that I will definitely be keeping for the future! If we ever have dinner parties or things of that nature I would totally make this as the soup for the meal. I loved it!
Did you find a recipe recently that you enjoyed? Or did you figure out what to do with a particular plant or vegetable that you weren’t sure of in the past? Let me know!
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