Chicken breasts with fennel and tangerines

Last weekend was a real foodie weekend. My boyfriend’s mum happily agreed for me to cook dinner on Saturday, which I took up very seriously, spending about 2 hours researching the Internet for recipes… and ending up creating something of my own at the end (inspired by something from my mum's blog)

I got the honour to use up a massive load of cheese left over from a lovely weeding the weekend before, which I turned into a fancy pancy mac'n'cheese. The cat was extremely interested in it. Should I take that as a compliment?

Does anyone these days use fennel much? I consider it to be one of those gourmet vegetables that have such an exotic taste, whatever you make with it is already much more interesting. I decided to make fennel the king of this recipe, allowing it to marry the sharp sweetness of a tangerine and create an exciting base for some chicken breasts. If you haven’t tried fennel much, please do. In fact, does anyone know any nice recipes with fennel worth trying?

Ingredients for 6 people:

6 chicken breasts, cut into 3-4 medium chunks each

4 small onions

2 big fennels

5 tangerines

1 tsp whole cloves

olive oil

salt

pepper

fresh oregano for sprinkling at the end

Slice up your onions into nice half-moon shaped bits, as well as your fennels into chunks. Slice off the ends (corners?) of tangerines and slice them into nicely flat, quite chunky slices. Mix everything up in a big baking dish, drizzle some olive oil, salt and pepper, cloves, squeeze the juice out of the ‘corners’ of the tangerines and pop into a 180C oven for about 20 minutes. Pull out and get the chicken in there: mix it around to cover with all the flavours, add extra salt, pepper and olive oil if you need to and roast for another 30 minutes or until the chicken is fully cooked and there are lots of lovely smells in the kitchen. Once done, sprinkle some fresh oregano on top.

I served it with some vegetable - stock-boiled cous cous and a fig-gorgonzola-green salad.

Enjoy!

Fennel recipes anyone?