Pickles! (now with gratuitous garlic scapes)

Hello and happy high summer!

With high summer comes fresh produce, and when you have a CSA, sometimes you can end up with a lot of something that you don't necessarily have the impetus to cook with.
To that end, something I have gotten a lot of this year (I am sure you are shocked to hear based on this post, and then this post) are garlic scapes. Giving scapes a run for the money in the excess department? Fennel. I was overloaded, I didn't feel like cooking anything major (it's hot, turning on the stove takes effort) so I decided to pickle my excess veggie blues away!

Roasted Fennel

So, I roasted a chicken for dinner tonight, but I can't write about that, because as soon as our friend Chloe gets back from her exciting international trip, she's going to be the pupil at the first official Brooklyn Girls Cooking cooking lesson, Roast Chicken 101! See, when I blogged about Curried Chicken Salad, she pointed out that it was putting the cart before the horse for kitchen newbies to have a recipe calling for leftover cooked chicken, so Alyce and I are going to teach her, which we're very excited about. (Granted, another reader simply bought a cheap rotisserie chicken instead of whining about it, but whatever, I digress.)

Aaanyhoo, I decided to instead let y'all know about one of the accompaniments to the chicken, a roast fennel (top left in photo above) that I considered doing in the pan with the chicken but ended up doing in a separate dish -- thereby not putting the cart before the horse with a roast-chicken-derived recipe this time.

This serves two and involves little more than a toss in oil. It shrinks down a lot in the oven, so it's not so much a full vegetable side, more like a garnish to serve with meat in lieu of a sauce. (I served with green beans and roasted yellow peppers, and potato slices pan-roasted with the chicken. Hey, the air finally cooled off so I thought I should get a last hurrah out of the oven for the season.)

You may think of fennel as being crisp and having a licorice taste, but that's just when it's raw. Roasted, it softens, develops a rich but subtle not-quite-sweetness, and becomes addictively caramelized. If you do cook it with meat, it will soak up the liquid and flavor and get that much more tender.