Fennel and Pastrami Gratin; in which I say the word "fronds" about a million times

Sometimes it pays to be late with your post!  Today, I'm going to write about a dish that, while tasty, suffered (texturally) from an overabundance of fennel.  I just read Sahra Kant's review of her near-disastrous meal at Romano's Macaroni Grill, which also suffered from, among other things, an overabundance of fennel.  Now me, I love the flavour of fennel, but with this Fennel and Pastrami Gratin, at least as I made it, the problem isn't the flavour... it's the fronds.

Fennel, if you're not familiar with it in its fresh form, is a bulb with stalks coming out of it, culminating in dill-like fronds at the top.  I had a bulb from a colleague's CSA box, so those fronds were lush and abundant and had not been trimmed off.  When you find fennel in the grocery store, apparently those fronds are often trimmed, and I wonder if the person writing this recipe originally was expecting that amount of frondularity rather than what I had.  Here's the thing.  The recipe has you keep those and bake them into the dish.  It tastes great, but the concentration of all that grassy-textured matter is, well, grassy!  And you don't want to feel like you're out grazing in a pasture when you're eating your dinner, do you?  Maybe you do.  I don't know your life.  But I don't, particularly.

So here's what you do.  You make this but you use WAY LESS in the way of fronds.  That way, you get the taste without the weird texture.  I've detailed my master plan for improving it over at the recipe.

But seriously.  Can you go wrong with a bunch of potatoes baked up with cheese melted all over them?  And pastrami? Oh god.  Deliciousness.  Really the only problem is the frond fest, and I really don't think you'll sacrifice flavour by using way fewer of them.  What do you think?