Lately I’ve been challenging myself more to cook with ingredients I am not that familiar with, and fennel is just one of those. While analysing this tendency of mine, I’ve reached the conclusion that it might be a consequence of growing up in post-communist Romania. Being deprived of much of the non-native to Romania produce that the West had access to, I’ve grown quite obsessed with them. It can get quite maddening when guests come over and instead of serving a regular dish that would work with everyone, I´ll run a risk and come up with something half crazy – salads in particular refuse to do the boring way, as demonstrated here. So I took inspiration for this particular salad from a fennel and tangerine salad online from this site, but I swapped it for oranges and added the salmon before coming up with this final version, which now that I’ve tried over and over again, I am happy to share with you too.
If you´ve been paying attention on my Instagram this weekend, you surely saw the world´s most beautiful mushrooms – pleurotus djamor. I found them at the farmer´s market on Saturday and was drawn to them like to a beautiful pair of shoes or book. The farmer selling them admitted they didn´t taste any differently than regular pleurotus mushrooms and I suspect they were more expensive (I chose not to check haha), but they looked so beautiful on my plate I regret nothing. I pondered a lot what to do with them and ended up giving an Asia egg noodle soup a try. It ended up pretty yummy, and this #homemadeMonday you´ll be getting the recipe of how I´d do it even yummier. So keep reading.


