Roasted Cabbage and Fennel

I’ve long been a fan of roasted veggies.  Rub a little olive oil on them, stick them in the oven at high heat, with whatever seasonings strike your fancy, and remove and eat.

Ready to eat

This one turned out quite tasty, and the idea of adding mustard popped out of a different recipe from Melissa Joulwan’s new book, Well Fed 2:  More Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat. (which I hadn’t had a chance to crack open before writing my most recent cookbook post).

So, here we go:

Pre-heat oven to 400 F.

For Serving One Person:

About 1/2 of a small red cabbage, sliced thin. This one came from a farmer’s market and so is smaller in New England than your standard supermarket size.  (You can use green but note they tend to be larger.  Adjust amounts accordingly.) 
1/4 cup sliced/chopped fennel bulb
3 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
3 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons or so of Dijon mustard
1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon of fennel seeds — I went on the heavier side, but base this on how well you enjoy fennel.  It goes further in veggie dishes than it does, say, in ground pork.
Salt and pepper to taste.  I went with about 1/8th teaspoon of salt and a good 1/4 teaspoon of Trader Joe’s Rainbow Peppercorn mix, which is my “go to” pepper mix these days.

Ready to mix, sitting in a somewhat deep bowl

For serving two people:  Double everything except the garlic cloves (five is plenty) and the olive oil (1 tablespoon should be plenty)  You can also add in additional fennel bulb slices to taste — the above is what I had, as the rest of the bulb had gone, er, bad.  Place everything lovingly in a bow big enough to mix in.  Use your hands or a large spoon to mix.

Spread everything out on either parchment paper (recommended, if you have) or aluminum foil on a baking sheet, without large pockets of veggies — thin this out.  For two people, use a full size cookie sheet.

All laid out and ready to go.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, remove, and serve.  It has crispy sections and moist sections, and that mustard added a whole new layer of complexity to this dish.  This turned out to be an excellent side.  You can also allow to get cold and serve on a bed of leaf lettuce, and maybe this would be a good lunch.

I’ve skimmed through Joulwan’s new cookbook, and am already pinpointing ideas to try.  If it is as good as her first book — and the recipes win me over by appealing to my international taste buds — it really doesn’t matter what type of food plan she, or anyone, follows — if you like good and real food, there should be several excellent somethings in the book for everyone.   And very few of her dishes could be called “pricey” to prepare.

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