Every cook who gives dinner parties needs to have a few genius-of-simplicity recipes available for providing relief in an otherwise-extravagant menu. If you’ll be serving hors d’oeuvre, appetizer, first course, main course, cheese platter, and dessert, you can’t, in charity to your guests, make them all blockbusters.
This week I added to my repertoire a great new appetizer: quick, easy, and delicious, with exactly two components, which are available year-round but especially suited to an autumn or winter menu. Prosciutto-Roasted Fennel is from a brand-new book called The Winemaker Cooks, by Christine Hanna, who owns Hanna Winery & Vineyards in Sonoma County, California. It’s a pretty book, and many of the recipes would qualify, to my taste, as those dinner-party blockbusters. It was a surprise, therefore, to find in the book this utterly simple gem. Here’s how the recipe became part of my dinner plan.
The party would be starting in the living room with Champagne and nibbles: a foie gras mousse; two kinds of Italian salumi, ciauscolo and corallina; frollini al finocchio (tiny ham-cheese-and-fennelseed-flavored biscuits); and toasted hazelnuts.
The pasta course was to be tagliarini all’uovo with a sauce of Tom’s contriving, involving fresh maitake, dried porcini, ground veal, onions, good broth and a little cream. (Sometimes he uses white truffle paste instead of the two mushrooms, but we didn’t have any on hand this week.)
For the rest, roasted squabs stuffed with chestnut puree, accompanied by braised Savoy cabbage. Five kinds of cheese. Spiced pear tart. Chocolate-covered espresso beans. And, of course, to accompany all that food, an array of red wines, coffee, and brandy. Quite a hefty menu.
But I didn’t want to bring people to the table and immediately put big bowls of pasta in front of them. I needed a small, neat, palate-stimulating thing for them to toy with as they settled in for the meal proper. The prosciutto-roasted fennel was just the thing. The salt of the prosciutto and the vegetal sweetness of the fennel danced with each other delightfully and left us all eager to move on to the next good taste.
Unlike most of the other dishes on my menu, this one took hardly any time to prepare. Cut large, trimmed and cored fennel bulbs into fat spears, fold a slice of prosciutto around each one, and roast them for about 15 minutes. (The recipe didn’t even say to oil the baking sheet, but I did, so that brought the number of ingredients up to three!)
You can see how I’m going to be starting a lot of dinner parties this fall and winter.
This sounds like a real winner.
Was 15 minutes enough time for the fennel to become soft or was it quite crisp? How about a touch of oil on the fennel before wrapping?
Unfortunately I don’t have any fennel in the house tonight.
The prosciutto wrap seemed to hold the fennel’s moisture in, Victor. It came out pleasasntly crunchy — not actually soft but not crisp either. I don’t expect that a touch of oil would hurt it, however. I’ll be making it again for a dinner tomorrow night, so if anything changes, I’ll let you know.
Diane
You’re welcome — but really, thank the cookbook author!
I tried it the other day. It was very well received by my guests as part of a mixed antipasto even though the fennel and the prosciutto were not the best possible.
Thanks for the idea.
[...] again our sparkling wine went from hors d’oeuvre through roasted prosciutto-wrapped fennel (when you find a good thing, stick with it). The characteristically Rufina earthiness of the [...]