Pasta with fennel, tomatoes, olives and shrimp

Many Americans are only familiar with fennel as the seeds in their sweet Italian sausage, but raw fennel has become really easy to find and there are all kinds of things you can do with it. Fennel has this great fresh anise flavor that's crisp and sharp when raw, but sweet and mellow when cooked.

This recipe is from a new cookbook (gifted by a certain lovely Auntie!) called Weeknight Fresh & Fast. It's full of wonderful quick recipes all organized by season, which I love. I flipped straight to "Winter" and quickly selected this as the inaugural dish. It came together in under half and hour and was comfortingly delicious.

Snapper with orange-fennel salsa, lemony quinoa and salad

On my usual Saturday morning grocery excursion I noticed them back in season: blood oranges. Ooo!! Then I remembered I had half a fennel bulb in the fridge leftover from a Mario Batali recipe last week and instantly put this on the menu.

Suffice to say I made mimosas out of most of the blood oranges, but you only need a couple for this recipe. And of course, you can use regular old oranges as I do most of the time. But aren't they cool?? I found this recipe on epicurious.com a few years ago after receiving a fennel bulb in my farm share one week and having absolutely no idea what to do with it. It's one of the only recipes I follow to the letter - I wouldn't even know where to begin on improving it, it's pretty much perfect. It's quite elegant too, making it great for company, especially since you can have your salsa and sides ready to go and all you have to do at the last minute is grill your pretty fish.