Olive & Fennel Salad

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My first visit to my in laws was full of culinary delights. We spent nearly the whole week in the kitchen, cooking, eating, talking about cooking, sharing recipes. My Mother-in-law loves food, possibly more than I do, she’s a kitchen magician who managed to raise kids who had never had jar pasta sauce or spaghetti-os until they moved out of the house, when they realized what she meant when she said it was all crap. Strong opinions has my Mother-in-law.  Cyndi learned to cook at her knee and, as her long game is strong, she slowly doles out culinary delights every so many years. She says it’s to keep me interested. She waited 10 years to show me how to make fresh pasta. 10 years. I have no idea what she will come up with at 20 years but I expect brilliance.

This salad was one of my favorites, I ate bowl after bowl. It’s still a favorite and when the fennel is in season we almost always have some of this in the fridge. It gets better after it sits for a while but be aware that I recommend a light hand with seasonings if you’re going to leave it in the fridge for a few days as the flavor gets stronger with time and if you’re not careful, it will be like eating fennel with spoonfuls of garlic sauce from Zankou Chicken. Delicious, but it will be leeching out of your pores for a few days and a distinct trend toward rapid movement in your digestive system (shall we say), fresh garlic, its not just a condiment or immune booster!

One thing I would say is that you want to be sure to use the freshest fennel you can find. It should smell like fennel when you pick it up, this makes a huge difference in the overall flavor of the salad. I would also recommend (even though it’s a true pain in the ass) using un-pitted olives, at least for the kalamatas. Pitted, jar kalamatas tend to get mushy and it really effects the texture.

Last thing, we have started substituting many of our dried herbs with essential oils. I’ll have the measurements for both in the recipe. Dried herbs should, technically, be thrown out and replaced every few months for best flavor, who can afford that? The reason they go bad is that the essential oil is finally evaporated off them entirely. So we started just using the essential oils (there’s more info about this here). I want to say that you can’t just use any essential oil to cook with, there is way too little regulation on them, in the US anyway. So if it doesn’t have a nutrition label on it, don’t eat it. If you would like to know more about this, come to a cooking with oils workshop, or throw a cooking with oils workshop, email me through the contact me page and I’ll get back to you. If you just want to order some  oils to cook with that you know are safe, go here. I’m not making any claims about flavor or safety for things I haven’t used, I only use Young Living essential oils.

Enjoy! TKW