Hard to believe; I found a new spice

Posted by dbcurrie, January 3, 2009 at 9:27 PM

So, someone told me about this olive oil store, and I had to check it out. No, really, an olive oil store. Feel free to make Popeye jokes, as DH did, but it's apparently true. I say apparently, because the sign said they're on vacation for a week.

But next door was a spice shop, and since I already wasted my time driving, and I fed a parking meter, I wanted my money's worth, so I checked out the spice store. Let's just say that there aren't a whole lot of spices that I don't own and/or haven't tested and rejected. And if they do exist, they aren't sold in any normal store. So I was skeptical that I'd find something I wanted.

Yeah, they had a lot of blends with quirky names, but that's not new, that's just a different mix. Ho hum...cinnamon, marjoram, pepper, more pepper, other pepper, grains of paradise, vanilla...and then it caught my eye.

Fennel pollen.

Yup.

I saw some TV show...maybe something with Bittman, where a chef was going delirious about how great this stuff was. And I was thinking that I'd never seen it before and would probably never find it anywhere. And there it was. So I bought some.

And on the way home, I stopped at World Market and bought a big honkin' jar of olives and a 4-pack of vanillas -- from Madagascar, Mexico, Uganda and New Guinea. Interesting.

Oh, it was a lovely day. Thirty degrees colder than yesterday, cloudy, and I had a great day shopping.

So, has anyone actually used fennel pollen? Or am I in completely uncharted lands?

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