le sauce

sauteed brussels sprouts with fried shallots and almonds

There is the camp that claims to have loved Brussels sprouts since childhood (kids far more mature than I was) and the camp that was converted when we learned how amazing they are when roasted or fried until caramelized. Then there's the camp that still hates them anyway. But I do sort of wonder if even they (you?) would like them caramelized, with some of their bright green leaves just wilted to and scattered about to for flirting purposes, and toasted almond flecks plus shallots fried in butter would change a mind or two. If anyone from that camp is willing to give these a try, please report back. Everyone from the first and second camp, gather 'round these with your biggest spoon.

perfect for tonight: onions

Three weekend-worthy dishes that will remind you that nothing compares to slow-cooked onions.

roasted onion and fennel soup with pistou

 

onions, roasted in their skins, with tarragon dressing

 

french onion soup with porcinis

french onion soup with porcini

Your chances of finding a meat-free French onion soup at a restaurant are next to nil. It's traditionally made with a beef (often veal) stock, which I'll admit, is a nice match for those sweet onions. But there is a way to get just as flavourful a French onion soup without beef stock, using a common substitution.

Where there would be meat, use mushrooms. 

A handful of dried porcini mushrooms steeped in hot water creates a full-flavoured broth that still lets the flavour of the onions shine through. So with that out of the way, the only thing to concern oneself with is making sure those onions get as concentrated, sweet and brown as possible. In other words, caramelize the heck out of them. This takes a long time (up to two hours,) but takes so little effort. It's a matter of letting the onions sit in the pan over a low heat, and you walking by every 20 minutes to push them around. That's it. 

Your house will fill with the intoxicating aroma of onions caramelizing--reason enough to make this soup and we haven't even gotten to the melty, cheese crouton yet.

roasted onion and fennel soup with pistou

you could take 2 vegetables, cook them, blend them and you'd have a very, very satisfying soup--especially if one of them is an onion, leek or shallot. potato and leek soup is popular, french onion soup doesn't call for much more than its star ingredient, and this simple onion and fennel soup is delightful, if i do say so myself!

roasted in the oven, the onions and fennel become sweeter but don't caramelize, which, once blended, leaves you with this silky, white soup. if you're asking yourself if caramelizing might produce a more flavourful soup, i asked myself the same thing!

no wonder we're friends.

how to know, except to try? so i cooked them over the stove as a test and made a delicious, if less visually pleasing, soup. the golden vegetables were tasty but the sweetness actually overpowered the flavour of the vegetables themselves. in comparison, there was hardly any fennel flavour to be found. roasting the vegetables kept the integrity of the flavours in tact, and it also produced a thicker soup since the vegetables held their texture better in the oven too.

i actually made this soup with a pistou in mind. pistou, a french paste similar to pesto but without cheese or nuts, is usually served on top of a thin vegetable soup. and as far as tradition goes, i've broken many rules here, starting with serving it on a pureed soup, one that doesn't include soley summer vegetables, not pounding a tomato into the pistou, and adding lemon instead. mon dieu! but the effect is the same. the zing of fresh herbs (and, in this case, lemon) takes this soup to new heights, and separates it from stews and soups simmering on the stove with a bundle of herbs for an hour. it's not time for those (winter soups) in my kitchen, yet. this transitional soup is perfect for days when there as many leaves on the trees as on the ground. 

roasted onion and fennel soup with pistou

1 medium onion, peeled, halved lengthwise, then sliced thickly crosswise (about 3 packed cups)

1 fennel bulb (fronds reserved for pistou), peeled where needed, trimmed, halved lengthwise, then sliced thickly crosswise (about 3 packed cups)

2 tbs extra virgin olive oil, separated

1/2 tsp salt, plus 1/2 tsp

1/4 tsp pepper

for the pistou:

1 clove garlic, minced (about 1 tbs)

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 c fresh parsley leaves, finely chopped 

2 tbs fresh fennel fronds, finely chopped

2 tbs fresh basil leaves, finely chopped

1 tbs extra virgin olive oil

1 tbs lemon juice

preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

line a 4-sided baking sheet with parchment paper (foil works too but the vegetables may brown more affecting the colour of this soup slightly). toss the onion and fennel in the oil, 1/2 tsp of salt and the pepper and spread evenly on the baking sheet. roast in oven for 20-25 minutes, checking toward the end that the vegetables are cooked but are not browning much.

meanwhile, in a mortor, add the garlic and salt and pound until the garlic is a paste. add the chopped herbs, oil and lemon juice, and pound to a paste.

add 4 cups of water to a medium pot over medium-high heat. add the roasted vegetables, 1/2 tsp of salt and bring to a boil. remove from heat. puree with an immersion blender until smooth. taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.;the soup should be subtle since the pistou will add flavour, but it should not be bland.

ladle soup into serving bowls, top with a heaping tsp of pistou and serve.

serves 4.

onions roasted in their skins, with tarragon dressing

 

i don't get the foodtv channel anymore. it's a long story--mostly having to do with wanting to slash my ridiculous monthly cable bill and realizing i almost exclusively watch hbo and pbs. but when i did watch foodtv, i never missed an episode of laura calder's french food at home. i was around a tv loaded with cable channels the other day, and i caught the episode where she made onions roasted in their skins. that's literally all you do, throw them in the oven with their skins on and let them go for an hour and a half. in the meantime, you whip an egg with tarragon, white wine vinegar and olive oil, and wait impatiently while...

your house starts 

to smell like a million different mouth-

watering dishes... and you remember that onions are behind every one of them. 

i didn't even realize that this recipe's in laura calder's book french food at home which i have, because i've been that bad about actually using my beautiful cookbooks. but as i've mentioned before, i'm making and posting favourite recipes from my collection at the beginning of each month. this will definitely become a favourite.

 

 
baked onions with vinaigrette
(via foodnetwork.ca)

[ys notes: there's a raw egg in the dressing and some would advise that you don't serve that to anyone pregnant, elderly, super-young or anyone with a weak or compromised immune system. just letting you know. oh, and i didn't have tarragon vinegar so i used white wine vinegar.]

ingredients:
4 medium-sweet organic onions, unpeeled
4 handfuls coarse salt
1 egg yolk
1/2 clove garlic, finely minced
1 teaspoon tarragon vinegar
1 pinch salt and pepper
1/2 cup grape seed oil
lemon juice to taste
handful chopped fresh tarragon
1 handful chopped fresh thyme

directions:
1. heat the oven to 425°F/220°C. Cut barely a sliver off the bottom of each onion so they’ll sit without rolling over. pierce them in a few places with a sharp knife so they won’t burst during cooking. make four mounds of sea salt in a baking dish and nest an onion in each. bake 15 minutes. lower the heat to 325°F/160°C and continue baking until the insides are almost applesauce soft, about 1-1/2 hours, depending on the size of the onions.
2. make the dressing: Whisk together the yolk, garlic and vinegar. season. beat in the oil, drop by drop, to make a thick dressing. taste, and add lemon juice if needed. check the salt and pepper. stir through the herbs. cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.
3. to serve, set the onions on serving plates (leaving the salt mounds behind). slit the onions open with a sharp knife and spoon some sauce into each until it starts bubbling up and out onto the plate. serve.

easter eggs

i jump on the bandwagon of a lot of holidays, just to partake in the aspects that involve food. usually i like the excuse to plan large feasts and drink too much with family and friends. but this easter it was all the talk of naturally dyed easter eggs that excited me. tamra davis used onion skins to dye her eggs and a friend linked to the kitchn's method that used tea, spices and vegetables to dye eggs, resulting in different colours depending on if you use brown or white eggs. i used both, and the purple cabbage did indeed turn brown eggs green and white eggs blue. i used red tea for another dye, turmeric for the third, and a combo of the blue cabbage dye and turmeric to try to get to green--didn't really work but perhaps if my dyes were stronger. i added a splash of vinegar and stuck them in the fridge to set...

 

but i sort of went out for the rest of the day and left my eggs in vinegar water for, oh, about 10 hours too long. they probably need just a couple of hours for the colour to set, and while mine looked vibrant when they first came out, the colour and a thin layer of the shell wiped right off--i think the vinegar eroded the shell. 

so i ended up with pale pastel shells which were still pretty. and still tasty on a mustard-y arugula and fried potato salad for lunch.

 

i love you, hank's mushroom sandwich

i'm blaming my iphone for this tiny, terrible picture, of a truely perfect sandwich, but at least you can make out some of the main components. the shitake mushrooms, smoked sheep's cheddar, minced roasted red peppers, spring greens and a killer (herbed? scallion?) mayo on hearty bread would have been enough. but those onions--thinly sliced, sweet and fried in a batter that manages to stay crisp till the last bite, make this this sandwich special. this is not the first time i've raved about a lunch from hank's but i'm going to go as far as to say that this might be my favourite sandwich EVER. so bad picture or not, i had to wrap up sandwich week with this one. 

the end. (hope you enjoyed it!)

green chili and shallot pickle

the chili love continues this week and i have one more recipe to share with you. this one is particularly special to me because it was my grandmother's recipe and it's probably the only one of hers i'll be able to share. as it is, i've had this passed on to me by my mother and my aunt, because i wasn't into cooking that much when my grandmother was alive and i didn't learn her recipes from her directly. although my mother and aunt learned to cook from her, they've made the recipes their own with tweaks along the way, and it's hard to remember how she did things originally. but her pickled chilies and shallots were so loved by all, that we try to get as close to recreating her recipe as we can. somehow hers still tastes better in my memory, although we don't think we're doing anything differently. 

as with most pickle recipes, there's really nothing to this one except to make the brine and let time, salt and acid do their work. and to be diligent about keeping everything very clean. my family goes through a small batch quickly whenever it's on hand, so they've never bothered to jar the pickle for long-term preservation. therefore, this may not keep as long as other pickle recipes, but on the other hand, this doesn't need to sit long before enjoying as others either. while this tastes better on day 2 or day 10, i have eaten these chilies after an hour in the brine, and it's already delicious. 

we eat this with rice and curries, like you would, say, lime pickle with indian food. this is a very different pickle than that, however. expect a much fresher taste, just as tart but more straightforward (maybe because there is no oil in this recipe to mellow out the flavour). you can add other vegetables if you'd like (i remember the odd cauliflower florets or julienned carrots at times) and you could also sweeten the brine with a pinch of sugar, which is how my mother likes it. 

caramelized red onion and blue cheese quiche

this should have been a tale of two quiches. i was planning to bring two different quiches to a baby shower i was helping to throw today. so a few weeks ago, i started to play with quiche recipes--for fillings that is. i should make it clear that pasties and baked goods scare me, regardless of how easy people say they are to make from scratch. i buy good, frozen crusts so you won't find any recipes for that here today, just what goes in them. quiche custards are pretty standard: 3 eggs and 1 1/2 cups of milk and/or cream for a 9" shell. the fillings were where i wanted to get creative. but what i didn't want to get was fat from recipe testing this. so i tested two at once...

on one side, caramelized red onion and blue cheese, and on the other roasted tomato and ramps. aside from being an efficient way to work on both recipes at once, this also appealed to the "why choose when you eat everything" side of me.

the quiche(s) came out great, so i felt with a few tweaks, i'd have two winners on my hands. little did i know that that night was the last time i would get to cook with ramps this year. (well almost...i'd saved some ramp bulbs and threw them raw into a basil pesto in the place of garlic and it worked fantastically.) so rather than get into the detail of roasting grape tomatoes and ramp bulbs for that quiche now, i think i'll sit on that recipe until next may. sure, there could be substitutions for those lovely wild leeks, but how well the leaves on top worked was half the reason i was so happy with the result that i just don't have the heart to swap them out right now. 

ok, enough of mourning ramps. there are other things to live for, like creamy, sharp blue cheese...

paris day 10: a visit with the experts

it's no wonder i'm so in love with paris. they do best the things i love most: wine, cheese, and despite the french's rep for being meat-tastic, they really know their way around vegetables and treat them properly. on day 10, i saw the professionals.

le timbre

le timbre is the cutest and tiniest little bistro on a cute little street. but the food is serious. for dessert we had their "timbre napoleon" pictured above (fantastic), my partner had a different kind of escargots, but my braised endives (both below) might have been one of the best things i ate on this trip. properly braised so that they were caramelized at the edges and cooked perfectly all the way through, and i think finished under the broiler maybe because there was some golden cheese on top as well, as pungent as a roquefort. i have been obsessing about this since i ate it so i'm going to try to recreate this at home this week.

quatrehomme

 

the last time i stayed in paris, i was living a few blocks away from quatrehomme and i never knew it. which is good and bad. bad because i could have tried a different new cheese every day and probably really learned a thing or two. bad because i would have gained a lot more weight than i did. this time i went specifically for the fontainebleu--fat content 60% according to the internet. i ate this whipped cream-like cheese (picture the top of a soft serve vanilla cone but 1,000 times softer) in huge scoops.

etablissements vinicoles de france

the last time i stayed in paris, i was living around the corner from  this wine shop, which was all good. on thursdays when the restauranteurs would come in to buy their wines, the shop would have a tasting of the weekly features. this is where on this visit as with the last, we bought all of the wine we'd cart back home. the staff are all experts of course, and very sweet and helpful so it's easy to choose great wines from this store. and these photos tell you a little bit about the selection.

le chateaubriand

finally made it to le chateaubriand, newer sister resto to la famille, on one of our last nights. i love them for not flinching when i asked them to do their 5-course tasting in vegetarian form (on the phone was one thing but in person, i sometimes get "...ohhh..."). i love them even more for making each dish amazing and not making me feel cheated for a second. 

above was one of my partner's courses or poppyseed coated scallops and heirloom radishes. below, a young radicchio and endive salad with fresh burrata! god, how i love burrata and i almost never get to eat this salty, gooey cheese of the gods. the green salad with raw olives and an onion sambol gave me many ideas (hello! new use for lunu miris!) i had to finish with the cheese option--i had reason to believe it would be good. my companion always goes for sweet and we were wowed with the mint/basil/chocolate dessert. mint ice-cream on a white salt wafer, with chocolate and a sweet basil puree.