Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you had a lovely Christmas with friends and family, a good break, some great food, and a fun New Year’s Eve yesterday! We spent last night at Osteria del Toro in Wellington. Really good cocktails and gorgeous food (at extremely good prices, by the way). Even if the weather was so rotten the fireworks were cancelled!

And now we have 2012 to look forward to. What do you hope for from the year ahead?

I’m going to focus on enjoying life, as it is. Taking good care of myself and my family, eating well (and feeding others well), keeping fit and healthy, and having more fun instead of getting hung up on details! I’ve got a few things to tick off my Thirty By Thirty list (starting tomorrow with a nervous visit to Adrenalin Forest in Porirua), too.

I’m looking forward to conquering new frontiers in my kitchen, but also to preparing simple food with delicious ingredients. Like this salad of Fennel with Walnuts & Oranges.

The recipe comes from The Silver Spoon, one of Italy’s best selling cookbooks. It has quite a focus on authenticity, and while I haven’t cooked from it a lot, anything I have cooked has been delicious, and well worth a repeat effort.

I had blood oranges to hand, so used them instead of the more standard variety. They’re such a creepy fruit! Beautiful orange skin with red speckles of warning, hiding flesh that really does look… bloody. They are perfectly named. Surely, I thought to myself, there are good jokes to be played on children who have never come across blood oranges before.

Enjoy the salad, and there’ll be more posts to follow later in the week. Have a happy 01/01/12!

Fennel with Walnuts & Oranges
from The Silver Spoon. Serves 4.

4 tender, round fennel bulbs, trimmed and thinly sliced
olive oil, to drizzle
salt and pepper, to taste2 oranges
6 shelled walnuts, chopped

Place the fennel slices in a salad bowl, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Peel the oranges and cut off pith, then slice and add to the fennel (I was happy segmenting mine). Add the walnuts, mix and serve.