The Perfect Onion Storm

Tonight I looked in the fridge and the freezer and noticed a theme among the ingredients we had lying around. We had tons of garlic, vidalia onion, red onion, leeks, frozen beef stock I'd made a month or two ago, and even a bottle of wine that we hadn't cared for and I put aside for cooking of some kind.

The conditions were perfect for making onion soup.

While most people insist on calling this French onion soup I find this designation annoying. Besides, we regretfully do not own any of the standard brown coup crocks one needs to make a proper onion soup.



At the store I could not find any soup crocks so instead I purchased two acorn squash, hollowed them out, roasted them, and used those as the vessels for the soup. This is an unusual pairing but I was more concerned with having something I could bake in the oven than anything else.

For the soup I melted some butter and olive oil, then threw in whole sage leaves, crushed garlic cloves, red onion, vidalia onion, leeks, salt, and pepper and cooked it all down for about an hour. Then I put a little red wine in (actually a lot of red wine) and then finished with the beef broth. I then topped it with sliced bread and, in an attempt to pair a cheese with the squash, Piave.

Then I broiled the whole thing for a few minutes and served.



I've kind of stalled out in my autumn beer/Oktoberfest beer mission. I became too overwhelmed by the options. It's a little sad seeing how it's not even October yet and we're only a week into Fall but I'm sure I'll get up some more steam after I take some time off. It was convenient, however, since wine is probably a better pairing for this dish.

The wine was a tempranillo and it as quite good. With the amount of wine I put in the soup it seemed almost unnecessary to have additional wine to drink.

The resulting soup was tasty but I definitely used too much of the wine. And it was most definitely weird to serve it in a squash. But, I suppose, it was the responsible thing to do. Seeing that I only make onion soup once every ten years I guess it would be wasteful to purchase soup crocks and have them lying around for the rest of the decade.

I guess that's my contribution to the environment for 2010: biodegradable soup bowls.

The Early Girl Gets The Martini

Just when you think you've seen the last delicious tomato of the season along come more. It almost makes the lingering and imposing humidity of the summer worth it to see these late stragglers.



I picked up these Early Girl tomatoes from a farm in New York. I got them mostly because they had what appeared to be funny little noses sticking out of them. And if you know anything about me you know that I enjoy an amusingly-shaped vegetable.



To go with the Early Girls I also got some burrata from Liuzzi Cheese. Burrata is always fantastic and this was no exception. Burrata is kind of like a culinary obscenity. It's like someone was just not satisfied enough with how delicious mozzarella was so they made a pact with the devil to create a hybrid mozzarella that they combined with all the love in the world.

If there's one thing I've learned from my biblical tales it's that no good can come out of something created in this way.



Every six months or so I have the desire to have a martini. This is sometimes a good idea and sometimes not. Tonight I decided to make a martini at home. This happens more along the lines of once every six or seven years. I chose to use the Heart of the Hudson vodka I got form Tuthilltown Distillery which is distilled using apples from orchards along the Hudson.

For Jen I made a traditional martini using sweet vermouth (finding out we were out of dry vermouth). Turns out that's really disgusting. Let us learn that lesson for you. Do not attempt to make a martini with sweet vermouth. Either leave out the vermouth or get off your lazy butt and get some dry vermouth.



We had the last of some Chilean Sea Bass in the freezer so I thawed that out, grilled it, and served it over a salad I made with shaved fennel, olive oil, lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt, and pepper. It was fantastic.

Now we're out of Chilean Sea Bass and I've fulfilled my martini quota for 2010. All in all tonight's meal was a very productive one. Very productive indeed.

Curry and Pumpkin Spice

On Friday we had a mutual desire to have a light meal. That gave me a good excuse to make something incredibly simple meal.



All I did was take a head of cauliflower and a head of broccoli and toss them with a little olive oil and some curry spices and roast them in the oven. I served them over some steamed quinoa and sliced up some tomatoes for the top. And that, possibly, is the most boring but healthful dinner one can imagine.



Along with all the Oktoberfest beers there are a plethora of pumpkin spiced beers. Pumpkin spiced, in America, simply means that they have thrown in a little allspice. This generally does not mean that any pumpkins were harmed in the production of said product.

I took this opportunity to sample one of these beers, the Wolaver's Will Stevens' Pumpkin Ale. I figured that this spice would blend most ideally with the curry in this dish. It turns out the spice in this beer was subtle enough that it went almost unnoticed. Still, it was a good accompaniment to the spiced florets.

That Will Stevens really knows his stuff.

Bison Lasagna

Bison Lasagna. It just sounds kind of weird. However, it couldn't be any closer to normal. Lying around were pasta sheets, ricotta, fresh mozzarella, more Rao's sauce, fresh basil, and ground bison. This seemed like the obvious (and easy) follow up to Oktoberfest.



I browned some onion and garlic in a little olive oil, browned the ground bison until just barely cooked, then added the sauce to the bison and built the lasagna. Pasta, fresh mozzarella, ricotta, and whole basil leaves were the only items used, layered with generous scoops of the sauce.



For the wine we had Abbaye de Saint-Ferme. The most interesting thing about this wine was that I couldn't remember spilling any wine while pouring it but noticed the horrendously wine-streaked label after pouring. A search on the wine brought up this blog entry which featured a similarly stained label. This leads me to believe that this is some intentional printing detail done to shame the buyer into thinking they are a sloppy pourer. Indeed I had the 2004 vinatage, the same as the author of the exquisitely-named Decanterberrytales.com blog shows on his site. Yet our labels do not match.

So either we are both terribly clumsy pourers or this is an intentional print detail. I could probably look this information up using Ask Jeeves or Altavista or something but I'm far too lazy for that.

Or perhaps I've been buffaloed!

(I apologize for what just happened there.)

September Oktoberfest

Two days ago Oktoberfest began. In the United States this holds little (if any) meaning since most people just know that this vaguely involves beer and are unaware that twelve of the sixteen days of the celebration take place in September. German and Bavarian cuisine is something I seldom make mostly because we only spent about 45 minutes at culinary school learning German cooking. The remaining 1,035 hours were devoted to French cooking.

I did have a few German chefs at school who would sometimes slip in some German cooking tidbits, taking cautious looks around then returning to their lecture about how to make a beurre blanc if the dean happened by the classroom.



I had some Finocchiona salami lying around so I decided to slice that up. Finocchiona is a Tuscan salami made with fennel seeds. It is in no way German but I figured if I served it with a sweet mustard (my favorite SchoolHouse Kitchen Sweet Smooth Hot Mustard), sliced onion, cornichons, and rye bread with butter I could detract from its Italian heritage.



For beer I opted to go with an actual German beer in the Oktoberfest variety rather than the local American varieties I've been enjoying so far in the tail end of summer.

I have to say that the Oktoberfest beer from Spaten was my favorite so far. It was very simple and reminded me of the fact that a lot of the American versions I've tried recently seem to be trying too hard.



For the main course tonight I browned some Weisswurst and stewed some onion, red cabbage, and sliced apples (still going through the apples we picked in Vermont) along with some rendered bacon. Jen had seen these sausages in the fridge a few days ago and voiced her disapproval. I believe she said they looked like maggots or something. She's always saying things like that. I guess maggots look a lot different in Canada. And a lot more delicious.

This explains a lot! Amy Hepworth must be from Canada!



I have not made spätzle since culinary school. One of my chefs (who will remain nameless) showed me how to make spätzle batter and flick it off of a cutting board into a pot of boiling water in thin ribbons using the back of a knife. He was incredible at making spätzle. Unfortunately he was a terrible teacher. This is the only thing I really learned from him during my time at the school.

Coincidentally he was the only chef that I had for two different classes. Lucky me.

In the grand scheme of things I think it might have been worth it because I did learn how to make some pretty good spätzle.



Finally I made some pan-fried potatoes which the Germans call bratkartoffein. This is basically exactly like making home fries. I rendered a little bacon, cooked some onion, toasted some caraway seeds, and then browned the potatoes to at least give them a little bit of a German flair.

I would have liked to make a German dessert, perhaps some sort of apple streusel, but I had already used up most of the allotted hour to make everything you see above.

Instead I ate a delicious cupcake that Jen stuffed into a coffee cup and smuggled home to me. Jen had her dessert first so I just rammed the cupcake into my mouth while I sat on the couch and watched an episode of Doctor Who.

The ceremony of our meals tends to break down rather quickly once dessert hits.