Christopher Kimball Does Not Approve of This French Onion Soup

No such thing as a pretty picture of French onion soup. Okay, there is, just not here.

When you come home cranky and tired late on a Friday, and your partner arrives soon after, having consumed nothing but a G&T and bar snacks, what better recipe for domestic bliss than caramelizing onions for 45 minutes before you can even think about starting to cook?

There were tears, but only from cutting onions.

The CSA had sent us a bag of onions each of the previous two weeks, so we reprised Ray's French onion soup. Changes this time

• Instead of 2-3 onions, we used ALL THE ONIONS (maybe 12 smallish onions, some with spoiled parts removed)
• Chicken bouillon cubes instead of beef stock (all we had)
• Cider instead of brandy (Ben saw us sweating the onions and brought me a bottle from the fridge, so it was in my hand and half-drunk while cooking)
• Hunk of rosemary lopped off the top of my plant instead of proper bouquet garni

A pretty good easy fall dinner. Don't skip broiling the bread and cheese on top!

P.S. He would disapprove of the way we cook around here, but I sort of loved the New York Times Magazine piece on Christopher Kimball and Cook's Illustrated last week: Cooking Isn't Creative and It Isn't Easy.

Side Dish Saturday: Stuffing 2.0

What do you put in stuffing?

Because we were making ours as part of practice Thanksgiving (that non-holiday weeknight when we make a full Thanksgiving dinner -- this year including a turkey -- for twenty-five), Jack proposed we try an agile approach, developing a minimum viable product and then adding features as time allowed.

The minimum viable product for stuffing is box stuffing, prepared according to package directions -- add water, seasoning packet, butter. (Having already tried both this year, I can advise you that Trader Joe's stuffing in a box is much better than Whole Foods's stuffing in a bag, which was all but dust when it reached us.)

Features are any additions to that basic stuffing -- onions, celery, mushrooms, apples, dried fruit, herbs -- which we might prep and add if we had time, according to customer feedback (the guests would be arriving by the time we started cooking it).

To develop a list of possible features, I searched for "stuffing" on Epicurious, copied the ingredient lists for the first fifty recipes, and used Wordle to generate a tag cloud. (I did a little data cleanup first, joining some two-word phrases like "olive oil," and a lot of discarding extraneous words, like "tablespoons," after.)

(See the results larger on Wordle or download the PDF.)

My technique innovation this year was making the stuffing in our giant rice cooker to free up the stovetop (and leave some psychological space in the kitchen). I browned onions and celery in the bottom far in advance, and then, ten minutes before I expected everything else to be done, added apples, dried cranberries, the stuffing mix, butter, and a kettleful of hot water, and turned it on. The rice cooker shut off when the water was gone (no danger of burning; no need to stir), and it kept the stuffing steamy hot until serving time.

First Enterprise CSA Box

We got our first CSA box from Enterprise Farm yesterday, and I think we can say ... WORTH THE WAIT. This is Enterprise's large share, containing onions, sweet potatoes, lettuce, kale, bok choy, cucumbers, asparagus, fiddleheads, tomatoes, and strawberries.

(Has it really only been two months since our winter CSA ended? We've been through some dark culinary times since, so we've been literally counting the days for this.)

Our whole house gathered to eat the (amazing, delicious, incredible) strawberries and tomatoes with our breakfast of bacon and eggs and Italian grocery leftovers (bread, olives, burrata) this morning, and to collegially argue about what to do with the asparagus (rolled into crepes? with Hollandaise sauce?) and fiddleheads (with pasta? with Hollandaise sauce?). Delicious days ahead!

(Through a minor snafu, we didn't get our box until Friday and missed this week's newsletter. Any Enterprise subscribers know where the amazing strawberries come from?)

Sunday Chicken Stock

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nominally vegetarian household in unexpected possession of three chicken carcasses, must be in want of quarts and quarts of homemade stock.

Sara brought three partial rotisserie chickens home from a Passover seder yesterday, and I'd just been reading Michael Ruhlman's assertion that chicken stock is too easy not to make every week. And it was the kind of Sunday afternoon where you haven't even made a dent in the list of things you need to do before Monday, so, in short,  a four- to six-hour cooking project was exactly what we were looking for.

Though cooking an onion has always been my easy shortcut to making the house smell like food is happening, simmering a chicken carcass does it one better: housemates were begging for soup that I had to tell them wasn't even broth yet. And though I'm still patiently simmering, I admit that Ruhlman's recipe is very, very easy.

Hot(dog)luck!

Inspired by Bon Appetit's astounding global hot dog guide (eighty different sets of toppings, with international themes, all with photos and linked to a map), we cooked up the hot dogs Jack's visiting brother left us and served them for potluck today.

Pictured above is an arugula-and-basil walnut pesto (our basic recipe) and caramelized onion hot dog.

Another international topping using CSA items: Real Pickles kimchi (from our Red Fire Farm winter CSA) + cucumber slices + cilantro + rooster sauce.

Tasty toppings, though not particularly CSA related: brie + pear slices (surprisingly good), sauteed mushrooms and beans, smoked Gouda and barbecue sauce.

Potluck Empanadas

Potluck was shaping up to be well attended this week (besides our usual crowd, we had a couple fascinating Airbnb hosts and a beard blogger), and what farm share vegetables did we have on hand? Um, onions and potatoes.

But what did we have in the freezer? Goya frozen empanada wrappers!

The name "empanada" comes from the Spanish verb empanar, "to wrap in bread," and empanadas are squarely in the tradition of food improved by being wrapped in pastry. After having made our own pasty dough last month, these frozen wrappers were amazingly easy to work with -- defrost, reroll a bit, fold over the filling, seal with a fork, and wipe with egg wash and sprinkle with coarse salt, if you're feeling fancy. Goya suggested deep-frying them, but as you know, I don't like to cook a la minute when company's coming, so ours went in the oven.
 
Filling number one -- and the star of the show -- was the onion and cheese recipe from this page, of which I was initially very suspicious. (Onions, garlic, honey, and cheese?) So suspicious that Erica caught me carefully following the recipe. (Not actually all that carefully. I couldn't find oregano -- Alex? -- and I substituted goat cheese for mozzarella, and, anyway, I couldn't respect the recipe writer once I realized the "add onions" step was missing.)

Filling number two expanded on the theme of ethnic pastry-wrapped foods with a samosa filling -- potatoes boiled and mashed with a spoonful of garam masala and defrosted frozen peas stirred in.

Filling number three was a vaguely Latin American stir-fried combination of refrigerator odds and ends (black beans, chopped red pepper and zucchini, Tony's seasoning).

Veggie Slop, Two Ways

What with all the upheaval of moving a five-bedroom house in January, the farm share cooking around here hasn't been very exciting lately.

(What is very exciting around here? Our brand-new granite countertops, that's what.)

This is two examples of the very first thing I learned to cook reliably, which my very first roommates termed "veggies in a pan" (as in, "Did you make veggies in a pan again?"). Former housemate Liz brought us the less sophisticated -- but unarguably descriptive and inimitably co-opy -- name "veggie slop."

On the left, we have a vegetable curry, consisting largely of roasted farm share potatoes, beets, and carrots. There's also an eggplant, a zucchini, onions and garlic, a can of coconut milk, and Indian spices in there, all served over rice.

(Footnote: We seem to have lost our vegetable peeler in the move, so we ate the beets with the skins on. Is there anything wrong with that? If not, I sure feel silly about all the time I've spent peeling tiny CSA beets.)

On the right, a cabbage stir-fry, incorporating a whole head of cabbage, two smallish daikon radishes, yellow onion, and cilantro, with rice and Asian seasonings.

French Onion Soup!

When your CSA gives you onions (so many onions, amirite?) ... make French onion soup?

Or better yet, have someone make it for you! This recipe comes courtesy of Erica's sweetie, Ray.

• Roughly slice 2-3 large onions (red onions give you a more savory flavor, while yellow onions will be sweeter; depends on what you like) and add to large soup pot.
• Saute onions in oil and butter (enough to coat bottom of pan) until deep brown, 30-40 minutes.
  
• Add 5-8 cups (depends on your desired onion to liquid ratio) of good-quality beef stock (the better your stock, the better the soup).
• Add brandy to taste (about 1/2 cup).
• Wrap sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves in twine (so they can be retrieved) and add to pot.
• Season with salt and pepper to taste.
• Bring to boil and then simmer, partially covered, on medium-low for 30-45 minutes, until flavors are well blended.
• Remove herb bundle.
• Ladle soup into individual ovenproof bowls and cover with 1-2 slices of Swiss cheese and 1 slice of French bread.
• Bake or broil until cheese is melted and golden brown.
• Enjoy!

Variation: Cook's Illustrated's Best French Onion Soup (also here) caramelizes the onions in the oven, which reduces stirring but takes a million years.

P.S. Once again, I scoop the New York Times; here's their piece on winter squash.

More Sauce to Your Leek

PISTOL: By this leek, I will most horribly revenge: I eat and eat, I swear--
FLUELLEN: Eat, I pray you: will you have some more sauce to your leek? there is not enough leek to swear by.
-- King Henry V, V.i

Oh my, what big leeks we had!

I didn't want to make a leek soup or anything where the leeks wouldn't be front and center, so I took a page from James Peterson's Vegetables (new to me, but highly recommended) and made something like his very simple leek gratin:

Halve the leeks in a baking dish, pour over a cup of heavy cream, add salt and pepper, and bake for 30 or 40 minutes.

Our lighter leek gratin had half a cup of light cream and half a cup of whole milk, actually.

(Can I digress for a moment? I decided this afternoon to go all old-school and look for a leek recipe in a book instead of on the Internet, and now I'm sorry. Our leeks were tasty, but just look at the sexier Jamie Oliver version of a leek gratin. And look at all the ideas on Epicurious! And on Ask Metafilter! And on TasteSpotting!)

Tuesday is our use-up-the-farm-share-vegetables day, so we served the leeks with roasted dinner: potatoes, butternut squash, apples, onions, and corn (all hacked into large pieces, tossed with oil and salt and pepper).

Summer-into-Fall Vegetable Chili

I came down with a nasty cold this weekend, to go with the decidedly fall-like weather, so it seemed like time to make a Giant Pot of Chili.

I like this chili because it takes lots and lots of whatever vegetables you have. (Maybe you're noticing a theme here?) Ours struck a nice-but-unplanned balance between late-summery farm share ingredients (fresh corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and celery from the CSA, as well as zucchini) and those more evocative of fall (butternut squash, carrots, onions).

The best chili is obviously the kind your mom makes, so I'm not going to tell you how to make it, except to say that I think a more-vegetables version is worth trying. (Our recipe is loosely based on Emeril's.) If you have strong feelings about what ingredients are allowed in a proper chili, you're welcome to call this vegetable stew. Or a ragout, if the queen's coming to dinner.

Because of a purchasing error, we didn't actually have any chili powder. (Note to self: giant bag labeled "chili powder" at the Indian market is pure powdered chiles -- something like our cayenne pepper -- not a great deal on the much milder American chili powder). I subcontracted the seasoning to Jack, who claims to have learned to cook by making chili, so all I can tell you is that authentic Farm Share Stories Chili features some combination of the ingredients pictured above (l-r: garlic powder, cocoa, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, apple cider, cayenne, garlic oil, cumin, liquid smoke, salt).

P.S. There is definitely leftover chili for today's food blogger potluck! Still time to RSVP!

Not-So-Lazy Corn Chowder

The lazy days of summer seem to have come to an abrupt end today.

First the summer part: With the sudden change in the weather, it began to feel like fall, and wool socks and blankets and nourishing soups all of a sudden started sounding appealing.

Then the lazy part: The weather canceled our original plans (to picnic with a crowd of friends at the Waterfront Performing Arts Series), and from the point of view of two in the afternoon, still in my pajamas (I was working from home) and nothing planned to cook, it seemed like a good idea to spontaneously invite everyone over for dinner and a movie instead.

(It's really a blessing to live in a house where you can say to your housemates, "Hey, I might have invited a few dozen people over for dinner in an hour," and they just shrug and say, "Do you want help peeling those potatoes?")

How not lazy is this? I even followed a recipe. (Well, okay, I omitted the bacon for vegetarian-ness, and increased all the ingredients by approximately 1.5 or 2 times, except where the math was hard, and didn't measure anything, and added the peppers late, and paid no attention to the directions on the bouillon cubes, and didn't have any sea salt. But I did actually use the fresh thyme sprigs -- upper right in photo -- not because we managed to grow any ourselves, but because we happen to be babysitting a traveling friend's well-equipped herb garden.)

We've made this corn chowder before (last year, chowder season began on September 15, so you see how unseasonal the weather is). It's my favorite because it has so many vegetables besides the corn -- onions, carrots, celery, red peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes -- and they're all vegetables that look beautiful in farmers markets (and even grocery stores) right about now. (You'll notice that I took the exact same cutting board photo last year.) In fact, Sara tried a ladleful just before the corn and cream went in and pronounced it a perfectly fine vegetable soup.

May you all be as warm and cozy as we were this evening, with our chowder and movie and good company and hot chocolate.

(This post is part of a Massachusetts Farmers Market Week blogathon organized by In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens as a benefit for Mass Farmers Markets. See Loving Local for evidence that local food bloggers are as prolific as local farms. Lots of excellent vegetable reading!)

Lazy Days and Loving Local

The laziest days of summer seem to be here, and we're happily feeding ourselves from our farm share without terribly much cooking effort.

Last Thursday, lunch was the farm share sandwich pictured here (somewhat inspired by an earlier version): lemon cucumber, tomato, fried egg, mozzarella, and basil-parsley pesto, on a multigrain bagel.

Dinner was a cold pasta salad, reprising the lemon cucumber, tomato, and basil; adding CSA red onion and defrosted frozen edamame; and dressed with crumbled goat cheese, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.

And for dessert, we popped our CSA popcorn (oops, that was delivered back in June; it's from Next Barn Over Farm in Hadley), and took it to Powderhouse park to watch Up. (Incidentally, if you haven't quite reached your quota of free summer outdoor movies yet, here's a listing of Boston-area series.)

So for lazy cooks, among whom I count myself first, it's a good time to be thankful for the bounty of beautiful late-summer produce that arrives in our CSA, ready to eat right out of the waxed cardboard box and the best for having the least done to it.

In the spirit of beautiful local produce, this post is part of the Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts blogathon, which is itself part of Massachusetts Farmers Market Week (August 22 to 28, 2010; events PDF).

Fellow food bloggers, here's how to participate in the blogathon.

Readers, check out Loving Local sometime this week for links to lots of other local foodie bloggers.

The blogathon was organized by In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens, as a benefit for Mass Farmers Markets. If you'd like to support them, this is the donation link.

Lazy Red Onion Pickles

I wanted to make pickled onions with the tiny red onions that came in this week's box, and I even went so far as to find a recipe. But then we finished last week's pickled beets (yum!), I realized pickled onions are pink anyway, and into the leftover beet brine went some onion rings.

We'll see how that goes.

If you'd rather do things the right way, I recommend drooling over Orangette's paean to pickles, including a recipe for pickled onions she describes as

... close to transcendent: cold and juicy, with a flavor that—between its many layers of cinnamon, clove, and chile—might best be described as Christmas in July, spicy and sweet. They look soft and bendy, but once between the teeth, they give way with a surprisingly noisy crunch ...

Minestrone for All Seasons

We've already discussed how we make a minestrone around here (hint: recklessly), so I'm just here to argue that a hearty vegetable soup is as good in April as it is in November. (Particularly on a 40-degrees and rainy long weekend.)

Our formula this time was aromatics (onions, parsnips, carrots, garlic) + long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potato, kale) + broth and canned tomatoes + quick-cooking vegetables and add-ins (green beans, parsley, canned red and white kidney beans, fried tofu cubes, Asiago cheese).

Footnotes

1. Epicurious offers a minestrone recipe for winter, autumn, summer, and late summer, but none for spring.

2. The Epicurious winter minestrone recipe suggested caramelizing tomato paste before adding it to the soup. Jack attempted to replicate the idea by browning our canned diced tomatoes in a skillet. We're not sure what effect that had, but it kept him out of trouble for a while.

3. It's hard to stir the minestrone when you've filled the pot to the brim with vegetables. However, the leftovers have so far warmed me up after a run in the 40-degree rain and carried us through an impromptu dinner party, so I can't in good conscience advocate making less.

Pizza Salad

We still tend to be overwhelmed by CSA lettuce, so "make a salad" is a persistent to-do list item. If anything in the kitchen isn't moving very fast, I threaten to put it in the hypothetical salad.

"I have one carrot left over."
"We can grate it into the salad."

"I chopped way more parsley than we need for the pasta."
"Let's put it in the salad."

"Does anyone know what these little screws belong to?"
"Put them in the salad."

"Have you seen the cat?"
...

So when instead we made a pizza that used up the little bits of everything in our fridge, Jack christened it "more-pizza-less-lettuce salad."

This pizza is topped with red onion, garlic, spinach, and cooked sweet potato chunks, as well as a can of tomatoes and a mixture of goat cheese, cheddar, and Parmesan. (We make pizza not infrequently; this is the dough we use.)

We also had a lone green pepper, but it was relegated to the actual salad.

(P.S. We are also a little bit excited about the breakfast pizza on Smitten Kitchen this week.)

Winter Vegetable Borscht

We had beets, so it was time to make borscht. According to James Meek, this was not without geopolitical implications:

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

(The full article from the Guardian is worth reading for murder, intrigue, travelogue, etc.)


As usual, we got the basic recipe from Epicurious (Beet and Cabbage Borscht), following the reader suggestions to increase the proportion of vegetables to broth, to omit the tomatoes, to add apple cider vinegar as well as lemon juice, and not puree the soup at the end.

A local blogger's Ukrainian-style borscht recipe gave us the confidence to throw in all our accumulated winter CSA vegetables: beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips/rutabagas, onions.

(Caution: Housemate Liz insisted to us 1) that she doesn't like borscht, and 2) that borscht is white. These claims seemed so absurd that we were forced to research them. It turns out Liz finds our borscht delectable and that there is a Polish white borscht, which has no beets but which includes such delicious ingredients as "sausage cooking water, fat removed" and hard-boiled eggs.)

P.S. I also made Mark Bittman's whole-wheat muffins with a last, giant, slightly bruised CSA apple to accompany the copious borscht leftovers.

Out with the Old ...

We ended 2009 by trying to eat down our accumulated vegetables, so I present Things You Would Never Think to Make If You Were Buying Ingredients at a Grocery Store, in two courses.

1. Squash-carrot-(avocado!?) soup

Just the latest in our long history of making large quantities of orange soup, this even-oranger-than-usual concoction included squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, giant garlic, and avocados. Non-CSA additions included a can of diced tomatoes, milk, curry powder, nutmeg, and a spoonful of Marmite.

Presumably there's a technique for making the soup, but I have to say this one was less rehearsed than usual.

Approximately: Cook the garlic in oil. Add squash and potato chunks and cook for a bit. Add grated carrots, tomatoes, canned tomatoes, water, and Marmite and cook until the vegetables are soft. Blend the soup a bit with an immersion blender, add avocados and milk to achieve desired consistency, and season to taste.

Makes an enormous amount of soup.

2. Stir-fried greens and ham

Our authentically vegetarian housemate is still out of town, so excuse the foray into carnivory.

Farm share items herein: Onion, green pepper, zucchini, basil, bunch of kale, bag of salad greens (I don't think normal people cook these, but I put them in at the very last minute to just wilt them a bit, and it reduces the volume a lot).

Non-CSA additions: Mushrooms and ham.

Brown the ham and mushrooms until the smoke detector goes off; set aside. Saute the onions, green pepper, and zucchini until just about cooked. Return the ham and mushrooms to the pan. Add the kale and a small amount of water, cover, and let steam until the kale is cooked. Add the basil and salad greens and steam for just a moment more. I seasoned with salt and pepper, red pepper flakes, and lemon juice.

Jack got a mandoline for his birthday (hi, Jack's mom!), so we did a beautiful mise en place with the onions, mushrooms, zucchini, and pepper very thinly sliced.

Winter Vegetable Pizza

With no CSA pickup last week, and all of us having had our Thanksgiving dinners elsewhere, we were feeling a little Old Mother Hubbard about what food we had in the house. Thank goodness for storage vegetables!

On top of a basic pizza dough, we layered

• Garlic sauteed in olive oil
• Caramelized onions
• Roasted potato and sweet potato cubes
• Roasted thinly sliced beets
• Roasted acorn squash cubes
• Seared mushrooms
• Cheese sauce (flour-butter roux + milk + miscellaneous cheeses)

After cooking (and a minute under the broiler to brown the cheese sauce), we topped it with arugula and goat cheese.

Corn Chowder

Inspired by the corn, potatoes, and onions in this week's share (and by the cold, rainy soup-making weather), I spent a couple hours Saturday afternoon making a corn chowder. (I used this recipe, made vegetarian by omitting the bacon and using vegetable bouillon cubes.)

I more than doubled most of the vegetables -- red peppers, carrots, celery, and sweet potatoes, as well as the onions and corn -- to make it a little more harvest-based than cream-based.

One of my biggest fears about living in a co-op (a small one -- there are five of us here) is that I will never be able to go back to cooking a normal amount of food again.