How do you like to eat fennel? Do you make a gratin? Or add if to the potatoes before you cook them to make mashed potatoes? Or do you juice it? Here are a few suggestions…

Fennel is lovely eaten raw if you slice it super fine and dress with lemon juice, olive oil and salt and pepper. Chill for 10 minutes before serving to give it extra crunch. Delicious with fish, chicken, or baked potatoes. See recipe below. Fennel is a great vegetable for roasting – you don’t need to cook it for very long, so for example if you are cooking fish in the oven you can sit it on a bed of slice fennel tossed in olive oil and salt and pepper and it will cook in the same time as the fish (try under hake – delicious!).
You can add fennel to any green salad for extra crunch – it has a mild crisp sweet flavour and makes a winter salad more substantial and filling. Enjoy!
Fennel and lemon
This is one of the simplest salads I know, the only important thing is that you slice the fennel really thin, this really makes all the difference. For a change you can add slices of orange to the salad, everything else stays the same.

Fennel bulb
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cut off the base of the fennel, and well at the green stems, if it is looking a little worse for ware take the outside layer off as well. Cut it in half and then thinly slice, if you have a mandolin this is the time to use it, otherwise sharpen your best knife and be careful! Add to a bowl with the parsley, some crushed black pepper, sea salt, lemon juice and a glug of olive oil. This works well if it’s allowed to sit for 30 minutes in the fridge to chill.