I am so into this recipe. I was staring at two bulbs of fennel and for the sake of being creative, I didn’t just slice it up with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and parmesan for my usual simple salad. I wanted to roast it and I wanted it to be cheesy and thus the Greek Fennel Bake was born.
SHOPPING LIST: 2 bulbs fennel, red onion, pitted Kalamata olives, feta cheese, grapeseed oil, garlic salt, pepper, dried oregano
This couldn’t be simpler. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Remove the stems from your fennel and any dirty outer layers. Slice the bulb in half through the core, and then slice each half thinly. Do the same for your entire red onion and combine the sliced veggies in a baking dish. Toss your vegetables in grapeseed oil, garlic salt and pepper. Take 1/4 cup of kalamata olives and slice them in half. Add the kalamata olive halves and 1/2 cup of crumbled feta (or MORE if you want it extra cheesy) and 1 tB. of dried oregano and mix well. Bake for ONE HOUR. It’s a long time but you want your vegetables to be blistered and fork tender and hopefully look like so:
You could easily serve it directly in the baking dish, but I thought it looked nice to use a spatula and CAREFULLY remove sections of the finished fennel bake and re-plate on a clean patter. This isn’t so much a casserole since there isn’t a binder – melted feta doesn’t creative an adhesive like say melted cheddar or mozzarella would – but the FLAVORS meld together beautifully nonetheless. Between the charred feta, red onion, olives and dry oregano, you will totally appreciate the Grecian influence of this delicious and easy fennel bake. Also, if you want to make this VEGAN – you could totally sub the feta for my fav Violife Just Like Feta feta.
The Kitchen Koach 