Amazing Salads: Fennel & Jicama!

Yum!

I have owned the Moosewood Cookbook for almost 25 years and I have cooked many many recipes from the book finding the huge majority to be amazing. I have my favourite casseroles and soups and salads that I have cooked countless times. For whatever reason, some recipes are always skimmed past and not even given chance — it could be random or out of misplaced vengeance not unlike my choice of headwear or that the ingredients, on first glance, don’t speak to me and it could be that my expectations for ingredients to speak to me or at all is as ludicrous as it is troublesome.

This was one such recipe.

Scary words such as ‘fennel’, ‘jicama’ and ‘dressing’ lept off the page as if to adopt me or, if things didn’t quite work out, provide me with free counselling. I was intrigued by the ingredients, but I just never stopped long enough on page 70 of the cookbook to commit to the salad. I have learned the hard way about committing to salads especially those on page 70 of cookbooks.

I’m not totally aware of what the trigger was that caused me to get off my high horse and finally give this salad a try. It could have been all of the splinters as there is a limit to how many splinters I can endure the needle-like pain of before reconsidering why I am even playing on a high wooden toy horse as an adult in the first place.

But one fateful day as if struck and felled by an off-duty cement truck, I decided to not only make this salad, but to own the making of the salad. It was a short, but meaningful moment where I filled out the necessary paperwork in triplicate thus securing my rights and privileges with this salad.

Allow me to go back in time as way of an explanation (note: this may also be a totally pointless tangent. I am fully aware of my pointless tangential tendency and actually consider them one of my best features.)

Around my mid-30s I consciously decided to make three changes in my life

(1) wear a belt

(2) demonstrate to my friends and family that I do, in fact, know how to wear a belt, usually for the purposes of holding up my pants and showing off my ability to correctly match my socks

and

(3) go out of my way to buy all vegetables and fruits at the local grocery store that I haven’t purchased and eaten yet and to research recipes that utilize them.

I had walked past these strange, nondescript tubers called Jicama many many times and was never attracted to them, but, in hindsight, it’s possible that I just wasn’t open to that sort of modern-day human-tuber relationship at the time. I would call eating Jicama a revelation, but I am one of those who believe that you only will receive limited food-based revelations in life and I am reserving mine for some day in the future that will hopefully be accompanied with pan flutes.

For those that haven’t tried them, you must. Imagine an apple, a pear and a potato somehow had a child. On second thought don’t imagine that — it is sick and disgusting! Jicamas are crunchy without causing you to worry about chipping a tooth; they are juicy without making you wish you were carrying a towel on your person at all times and they are just the right amount of fruity without being too fruity as I have a quota. And the J is the same J as in jalapeno — he gets around if you know what I’m saying.

I have always liked the idea of Fennel and often envisioned myself buying a whole cart load of them and strolling down the promenade on a bright summer’s day, getting some gelato and relaxing on a picnic blanket together. When a well-intentioned friend suggested I could also eat fennel, I was dumbfounded, but then again I was going through a particularly dumbfounded phase of my life at the time. For some reason, I had never considered these slightly-licorice-y flavoured bulbs salad-worthy and it is now one more thing that I have been freakishly wrong about in life.

Consistently undervaluing the comedic potential of the word ‘bandwidth’ is the other.

Fennel is close to a perfect food. The seeds, when roasted, are amazingly aromatic; the bulbs can be shaved thin and placed in salads or chopped up and braised; and the fronds are a scrumptious herb that can be used as one would dill (just don’t tell the dill). Like you, I used to compost the hard, wooden stalks, but just discovered how well-placed they are in vegetable broths and hilarious hats.

Before I go any further, I must say a quick word about the use of fruit in salads.

I like it.

This recipe can be taken in many different directions (mine is North-East!) as so many of the ingredients can be swapped with something else to fit your particular tastes. Some of us would say you are too particular, just never to your face or your neck if we have the choice. The salad in its original splendour is almost desert-like, even more so if you are farsighted or have just ritualistically coated your tongue with sugar.

Allow yourself the latitude to go wild when composing this salad! Your only limits are your flimsy-at-best adherence to your food budget and your capacity for thinking outside the box when it comes to salads. Break the box and do it now!

The Recipe

4 Navel Oranges

1 Jicama

1 Small Fennel bulb

a few large handfuls of arugula

8–10 small strawberries

4 Tablespoons Olive Oil

2 Tablespoons Orange Juice

2 Tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar

2 Teaspoons Raspberry Vinegar or Raspberry-Flavoured Red Wine Vinegar

1 Medium Garlic Clove

1/2 Teaspoon Salt

2 Teaspoons Honey

Instructions

1) Cut the ends off of the oranges with a sharp serrated knife if you want to do the job quickly and well or use a butter knife if you enjoy a frustrating and unproductive knife experience from time to time. Remove the remaining peel and then make supremes. For those that don’t know, supremes are small, half-moon shaped pieces of orange flesh without the membranes they used to call home and it is pronounced with a French accent. Allow yourself some time to perfect the accent before trying it out in public unless you enjoy being laughed at or egged (why do people carry around eggs with them all the time I always wonder after I’ve been egged).

2) If you were fortunate enough to find a jicama that was around the size of a small apple, pat yourself on the back exactly 5 times. It is really hard to do! Most jicamas are huge and would provide enough substance for a small family of 3 if they were all on a cleanse; otherwise they’d be starving. Peel the jicama — it is easy to do! The peel is all but asking to come off — how risque!

3) Slice the jicama in very thin slices. Use a mandoline if you have one, or allow the mandoline to sit on the counter and have a chuckle as you attempt, and fail, to manually slice the jicama as thin as you can without its help.

4) Remove the stalks and fronds from the fennel bulb and, once again, thinly slice by any means necessary. I am very take-no-prisoners when it comes to slicing my vegetables thinly. Reserve some fronds. You can never have too many fronds; until you do, and then you will be the last one to know.

5) Chop the arugula. Listen to the rain outside. Answer the phone if it rings. Continue humming obscure Broadway show tunes. Crack exactly one walnut.

6) Remove the inedible parts of the strawberries keeping in mind that what you find inedible could feed an entire colony of small aliens for a year.

7) In a small bowl, whisk the olive oil. orange juice, vinegars, garlic, salt and honey. Don’t attempt to show off to your cat how fast you can whisk. She just doesn’t care and you will have an oil spill to clean up all on your own as well. If you are not making the salad right away, then you must be very good at delayed gratification when it comes to sampling delicious salads. Refrigerate the dressing unless you have no room in the fridge because you took your mother literally when she said “well smart guy, why don’t you just buy all of the romaine?”

8) In a large bowl, gently toss the jicama, fennel and arugula with the dressing. Sprinkle on some fronds with a joy you were reserving for some odd reason (this was not it, but it’s too late now).

9) Carefully arrange the orange slices on top of the salad. Take a step back and take a mental picture. It will be the last time you see this salad in exactly this way. Try not to let it see you cry.

10) Now wantonly shower the salad with strawberry slices with exactly the correct amount of wanton. It’s an art.

11) The salad is now complete and you should serve it. It is just the right thing to do.

As I mentioned earlier, I have made so many different version of this salad in my life and each time I have made it slightly differently and it never fails to be yummy. Give me a second while I smack myself for using the word “yummy”.

Here are a few of the substitutions I have made when making this salad.

Possible Substitutions/Additions

1) grapefruit or pomelo instead of orange

2) any kind of berry instead of strawberries

3) granny smith apple instead of jicama

4) baby kale instead of arugula

5) for a tarter experience use lemon juice instead of orange juice — for an even tarter experience, scrap the salad and just drink a large cup of lemon juice

6) cilantro or parsley

I am guilty of many things and putting too many ingredients into my salad is one of them. I find with this salad, the simpler the better as it allows the perfect combination of textures and flavours to really stand out. The crunch of the fennel and jicama, the sweetness of the orange and strawberry, and the pepperiness of the arugula all together is almost magical. I fully understand that it would be cliched and ill-informed for me to actually call a salad magical although it has been known to lead to multiple incredible out-of-body experiences.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!