blue_dolphin

I've mentioned making caramelized onions in the oven before and promised @Anna N to share my method. @shain nudged me in that direction with his post earlier. On one hand, they are certainly caramelized onions, but with the addition of sage and balsamic vinegar, they may not be everyone's caramelized onions. I riff off a recipe in Deborah Madison's Savory Way for Roasted Onions with Sage which shares similarities to what @shain does. It calls for: 2 lbs red or yellow onions, cut into rounds ~ 1/2 inch (I usually go with ~ 1/4" slices and halve or quarter the onions before slicing to avoid long stringy bits. salt (I usually go with a generous pinch, < 1t) 2-4 T olive oil a dozen fresh sage leaves (or a lot more, depending...) 1 t ground pepper 2 T balsamic vinegar (@shain uses some brown sugar which I imagine would have a similar effect on browning) Everything gets tossed together, then Madison roasts the onions @ 375°F, covered for ~ 30 min and then for an additional 30 min or more I tend to give them 45 min - an hour covered and another hour or more uncovered, stirring every 15 min or so. Here are today's onions ready for the oven: After ~ 1 hr covered and ready to go back into the oven uncovered: After 15 min, uncovered. Below is about an hour later (1 hr covered, 1 hr 15 min uncovered) and they would be nice roasted onions at this point About 45 minutes after the photo above (1 hr covered, 2 hrs uncovered) And where I stopped, half an hour later (1 hr covered, 2.5 hrs uncovered). For a truly caramelized onion, I'd have let them go further, but I wanted something in between roasted and completely caramelized. I started with ~ 4 lbs of yellow onions and ended up with around a pound, an amount that fit handily in a 1 qt zip-lock. These make delicious crostini, topped with shaved Parmesan. I also like them tossed with roasted cauliflower and parsley, with or without pasta and/or garbanzo beans.

I have sliced onions for making caramelized onions both ways but have never done a side-by-side comparison with the same batch of onions, cooked in the same way. In This Will Make It Taste Good, Vivian Howard's recipe for caramelized onions specifies cutting the onions in half through their stem ends, then slicing the onions thinly, "from root to stem rather than cutting the onion across its belly," and says, "This is actually important because slicing it the other way makes the path to silky onions a longer one." Seems to me that if they are cut thinly, it shouldn't make a ton of difference in cook time. With all the stirring, the segments separate pretty well either way. In a couple of recipes, Deborah Madison says to cut them cross-wise, into rings or to first quarter them and then slice cross-wise. A Serious Eats article that considers a lot of variables doesn't say boo about the slicing orientation, though the accompanying photo shows them cut root to stem.

A few recent breakfasts Green eggs and ... no ham... but roasted potatoes and broccoli. Vivian Howard's This Will Make It Taste Good has a recipe for Asparagus Bathed in Green Butter. I made extra of that Little Green Dress compound butter, used some to scramble the eggs and tossed the roasted potatoes and broccoli with more. I was hoping the eggs would be greener rather than this baby puke color but everything tasted good. Little Green Dress salmon salad (inspired by @Anna N's swap in this recipe) on Wasa crackers A mushroom hand pie from a local bakery: Breakfast of champions - Christmas cookies and a mug of black coffee. In truth, I've had this for breakfast more than once lately 🙃 Spinach, mushroom, onion and country ham omelet with some of the Neal's Yard Red Leicester cheese that was part of the Whole Food's 12 Days of Cheese special That brings us to today, when I used leftover omelet filling from above and more Red Leicester to make a cheese toastie

A raspberry/white chocolate hot drink might be nice. I'd want Chambord in mine 🙃

Exactly! And I can make it in less than the 2 hr soak time!

Indeed, if you desire a narrow-bottomed loaf shaped like a bell pepper, this is your pot! I have a 3 qt Lodge that I like for baking no-knead bread and would recommend it highly over the smaller pot. It's also got a much larger base for searing and offers half-again more capacity. It's a work horse. The little one is very cute and quite handy for small cooks.

As mentioned, I have an LC tomato that's pretty much the same size as this green pepper. I find the small size quite handy for things like cooking 1/2 lb of dried beans or braising a small-ish piece of meat, serving 2 or maybe 3 at the most. Not long ago, I used it for a half-batch of the beef cheek barbacoa from Josef Centeno's Amá with about 1.5 lbs of beef cheeks. Perfect size to cover that amount of meat in liquid for a braise. But most people don't braise miniature amounts of stuff like that. They want to serve more people and maybe have leftovers. The bottom surface is probably ~ 6-inches across at the base so you can't really sear anything big at all. It's a handly little pot for someone like me but I wouldn't embark on a braising binge over it. It's certainly a cute little serving dish so that's a good idea. It would only bake very small loaves of bread and in the ice bucket application pictured, it could probably hold 1 glass, surrounded by ice. Maybe 2 or 3 shot glasses in a bed of crushed ice.

I enjoyed this LA Times article about a San Diego photographer who turned his studio kitchen into a small bakery during the pandemic. With no street-level storefront and wanting to avoid customers crowding into the elevator to pick up bread, Izola Bakery lowers the still-warm bread to the street in baskets. San Diego bakery’s warm bread is coming right down, by basket

I use it where a cover is useful to manage evaporation. A braise is generally defined as being first seared, then cooked in a covered pot. If I cook dried beans in an uncovered pot, I need to add liquid more frequently than I can remember so I find a lid handy.

I went over and picked up a piece of the Enraptured Blanc this morning around 8 AM. They didn't have a ton of it in the case where they've been displaying these specials. Three 1 lb wheels and about an equivalent weight in cut wedges. I chose a half wheel, about 1/2 lb and skedaddled.

I have a red tomato-shaped Le Creuset pot of about the same size that I also received as a gift. I use it for beans, braises, casseroles, etc. same as any enameled cast iron. I've found it quite handy to have a smaller-sized baker.

This may be too close to juicing and I know you said you weren't into that, but when I was doing breakfast smoothies, cooked beets were a regular. With a fistful of raw cranberries for tartness, a few other berries for flavor. Whatever else you like. At the other end of the beverage spectrum, Lindsay Jean Hard's book, Cooking with Scraps makes a very pretty tequila infused with beet peels and trimmings. It picks up an earthy flavor and a bit of sweetness from the beets and is quite sippable as is. The book uses it in a beet peel margarita Another almost alarmingly colored beet dish is the Bright-pink pasta from Anna Jones in A Modern Cook's Year. You sauté grated beets and capers in olive oil, then add drained pasta and some of it's starchy water to bring it all together. A sprinkle of dill, squeeze of lemon and maybe some goat cheese or feta and you're done. Finally, there a good recipe for Puréed beets with yogurt & za'atar from Ottolenghi's Jerusalem. I cut the date syrup back by half and like to swirl the beet and yogurt mixtures in the serving bowl rather than mixing to a uniform pink. Beet salads that I really like are the Carrot and Beet Slaw with Pistachios and Raisins from Josh McFadden's Six Seasons, the Christmas Lima Beans & Quinoa with Beets & Avocado from Rancho Gordo's Heirloom Beans and Beets with Lentils and Yuzu from Ottolenghi's Plenty More. The beans or lentils make the last two suitable as a vegetarian main dish salads.

Once they get sizzling, I cover the pan for ~ 45 min, stirring occasionally. Then remove the lid and stir more frequently for another half hour or 45 min. That timing is going to depend on how many onions you use, how wet they are and the size and shape of your pan. In my kitchen ~ 4 lbs of onions in a 12-inch cast iron skillet will go from here: Through here, where I've removed the lid and have been stirring a bit: To here, where I have about 1.5 cups of nicely caramelized onions:

@CanadianHomeChef has a nice temp chart that suggests 275 deg F for caramelized onions. I’ve had good results with that temp.

Soups for sure. The Turnip Soup with Turnip Greens in Deborah Madison's Greens Restaurant Cookbook is easy and excellent. I've made it with an abundance of CSA radishes, too. If you add a snip of beet root, it will come out a pretty pink, otherwise beige. Not sure if you have Vivian Howard's Deep Run Roots but it has good chapters on beets and rutabagas. The bacon-roasted rutabagas that she serves with pork tenderloin is really good as are the basic stewed rutabaga. I enjoyed the rutabaga relish, too. I haven't tried the Duck, Date & Rutabaga Potpie with Duck-Fat Biscuit Crust but it sounds excellent. In the beet chapter, the roasted beet salad with orange segments and pecans nestled on a buttermilk blue cheese dressing is a favorite of mine. The beet tzatziki that goes with the grilled lamb kebabs is delicious and goes with other things as well. In Indian-ish, Priya Krishna has a really good Mustard Seed and Curry Leaf Carrot Salad. If you julienne the carrots instead of grating them, this salad will keep in the fridge and add a fresh crunch to plates for a week, kinda along the same lines as the sort of carrot/daikon quick pickle that @MokaPot mentioned but with a different flavor profile. In general, Indian cookbooks are a good resource for pickle-y/salad-ish/chutney sorts of things to make and I find that root vegetables can often be interchanged or combined. I liked the Beetroot and Green Chili Pickle that I made from Mowgli Street Food and can imagine it working with other vegetables as well.

Done!

Two pounds of Georgia pecans from the friend I made the quiche for last week. They are fresher than anything I usually see in the stores around here.

I have Amazon Prime. Looks like that makes me eligible for free delivery of $35 minimum orders from WF. That would be a bigger piece of cheese than I had in mind.

Me, too. One of my favorites. I got 2 of the Prosecco-washed Harbison on Saturday. I like Red Leicester (tomorrow) and the Rogue Enraptured Blanc (Wed) sounds good but not sure they are worth 2 more trips.

Thanks. I learned from that (and verified elsewhere) that the Italian Nocellara olives that TJ's been selling are the same olive variety sold as Castelvetranos

I've been feeling so isolated, I'm sure it did me more good to feel useful than anything else!

The other day, I went over to Roan Mills in Fillmore. As usual, I asked a few friends if I could pick up anything for them. One asked for a vegetarian quiche and a vegetarian pot pie, among other things. They didn't happen to have veg versions of either so with her permission, I substituted a potato tart. The guy at the counter told me it was good and only $15 instead of $25 for the quiche. "TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS???" I said (to myself) , "I can easily make her a quiche! When I dropped the stuff off, I asked her to pick a day for quiche. She was ever so grateful and picked today. Here's the bake, slightly overbaked, but OK: Spinach, mushroom & onion on the left, broccoli, red bell pepper and onion on the right. I also included a bag of the caramelized onion and cheese pull-apart rolls I'd made from Vivian Howard's recent book. She's got a stressful job, she's working at home along with her husband and 2 kids and said needing to prepare lunches and dinner everyday was pushing her over the edge so she was delighted. Hope the kids will eat them! After the holidays, I'll set up a schedule to prep lunch for them once a week or so.

The cookies are good. I'm having one with my coffee now! Thanks for the duck input. I might go back and get one. It's not really any different from a wet brine and while I wouldn't want to pay $10/lb for water, at $2.49/lb, it's not so bad. Thirteen bucks for a bit of entertainment couldn't be all bad!

Yes, I think they are supposed to be fake Triscuits. Haven't tried them yet. I meant to get plain but grabbed the cracked pepper flavor by mistake. If they're OK, I'll go back for the plain. I used to buy the dearly departed TJ's ones all the time and it would be handy if these are a good substitute.

When I saw them, I thought I remembered you mentioning that they were good. Of course, there was hardly anyone in there but it does seem quite spacious. They had the aisles marked for one-way traffic, not sure anyone was paying attention. That port wine cheese in the little brown Wispride crock was a regular holiday treat when I was growing up so I had to get it for old times sake! This doesn't taste quite as sharp as I remember but it's not bad.