Entry 300) from Xanga

300) Both my dad and I have recently bought fennel.

Today's WWRecipes e-zine (the free, stipped-down variety) has the following excerpt about fennel. This is from Molly O'Neill, "A Well-Seasoned Appetite."

Like Persephone, fennel traffics between the darkness and the light. The pale green bulbous vegetable with its fibrous stalks and feathery fronds bespeaks the sun, as does its sweet, faintly herbaceous anise flavor when raw.  When fennel is cooked, its flavor becomes more elusive yet somehow more intensely licorice, and hence tastes dark and mysterious....  As with many mysteries, one wants just enough fennel to be titillated and perhaps, thereby, emboldened to approach other unknowns.  Fennel is primarily grown in Italy, southern France, and California.  When it appears in the early fall, fennel seems to extend summer; abiding through the winter months it seems to promise spring. Those who acquire a taste for fennel seem to be those willing to entertain simultaneous opposites, particularly little patches of sun in the season of the bleak.