Our CSA with Windflower Farm is totally awesome. For almost half the year, they load us up with delicious veggies, and they never skimp on the good stuff. Every once in a while, though, they throw us a curveball, like in one of our last shipments of the season, when they gave us a big ol’ bulb of fennel. Fennel looks kind of like a multi-snorkeled Snork and has a name that sounds like a scheming butler on Masterpiece Theater. Needless to say, the CSA fennel offering kicked around in our vegetable drawer for quite a while.

And then—eureka!—the NY Times cooking section laid a solution right in my lap with this recipe for Carmelized Onion and Fennel Risotto. When I started to make it, I realized that I didn’t even know what part of the fennel to slice, and I had to watch some YouTube videos to school myself. Basically, you just want the layered part of the bulb; you can make stock out of the rest of it, but it’s too tough to chew. That means that there was shockingly little fennel on my cutting board by the time I was finished hacking away at it. Would I even be able taste it in the finished dish?

Because it is in my nature to meddle with even the simplest recipes, I made a few changes to the NYT version. Adding sugar to the onions and fennel seemed weird to me, so I just didn’t, though I did throw in a little black pepper, which I like in caramelized onions. I used thyme instead of rosemary, because it was what I had; ditto on substituting some aged Emmental cheese for the Parmesan. And I added the parsley near the end, because I didn’t want it to cook away to nothing.

And the results were sooo tasty! The fennel, though small in volume, still made itself known. It was the perfect complement to the sweetness of the caramelized onions, making them more complex without being overly licorice-y tasting. The newspaper published this as a possibility for a vegetarian Thanksgiving, but in my opinion, it’s perfect for any chilly fall night or any time you need to de-fennel-strate your refrigerator.