Glazed onions au soleil levant

In Alexandria, Egypt, relatives of Claudia Roden served all kinds of pickled vegetables as appetizers. I'd have loved to be a guest in the fifties between cool white-washed walls at sunset. Between Françoise Bernard for French cooking and Claudia Roden for Jewish cooking, I borrow from both, and then follow Roden's timing - 15 minutes extra to 30 minutes of cooking. I had a few shallots, although far better it would be to prepare smaller white onions.

Glazed onions au soleil levant

Small white onions or shallots

Roden:
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons olive oil
lemon juice

Françoise Bernard:
50 cl water
40 g butter
1 teaspoon powdered sugar

Combine olive oil and sugar, heat, add the onions, braise them over low-moderate heat with the lid on for 30 minutes. I added a knob of butter and a splash of water.

Remove the lid, briefly turn up the heat, then lower, add the lemon juice, and let the sauce reduce to a thicker brown mixture in 15 minutes.

Taste, and serve hot or cold. If unused as appetizer, use in an omelet!

Picture: onions au soleil levant.

At home with a minor bout of flu: chocolate (rated X)

So coffee is off when felled by a bout of flulike symptoms, and judgement is severely impaired. This hot cup of chocolate by Françoise Bernard out of her book of French cooking was the poorest decision I could make, as under normal circumstances I'd criticize this concoction as lethal. But I had a small cup of it anyway. At your own peril...

Hot Chocolate (Rated X from a sane dietary perspective)

Serves 4

130 g dark chocolate
25 cl cream
45 cl whole cream milk
1 vanilla bean pod
4 teaspoons sugar

Scrape the vanilla seeds from the pod. Add every ingredient together to a cooking pot, and bring to a low heat, let the chocolate melt.

When the chocolate has melted, put a lid on this, remove from the heat, and let stand for 15 minutes. Whisk it up a bit.

Notes:
Extremely unctuous and high calory. I even added more milk than said quantity. Still, I couldn't believe this recipe. Serves the quantity of about 4 espresso cups, and luckily for all of us not one drop more.

Getting rid of old junk: simple oven-baked chicken

Get rid of old junk, my horoscope said, while I was sniffing away in hanky after hanky. So I looked at the squash that had been on my kitchen counter from before Christmas, cut up a pumpkin, collected whatever winter had left in the herb patch outside, and stuffed a chicken with that. In the chicken went lemon thyme and sage, and a big piece of fresh ginger. Just in case.

Simple oven-baked chicken

Cooking method from Françoise Bernard: bake chicken on its side

1 chicken
2-3 onions
olive oil
salt, pepper,
1 squash
1 small pumpkin
fresh herbs

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Rinse the chicken, coat it with pepper and salt, stuff it with herbs and ginger. Drizzle it with olive oil.

Put the chicken on its side in the oven pan, and put the whole onions around it. Put in the oven. In the middle of cooking time, turn the chicken on the other side. In the middle of cooking time, also add the squash and pumpkin, roughly chopped.

I had a chicken weighing 1,6 kg - this needed about 20-25' more than one hour.

Right after this feast, my taste buds went on holiday for three days. Morale: don't even try to cook or eat out then.

At home with a minor bout of flu: banana milk

Lastly, the sanest choice from Françoise Bernard's French cooking besides the usual choice of herbal teas and cool butter milk: a simple banana drink. No further ado here.

Banana Milk

Serves 2 or at 50% of said quantities, 1

500 ml milk
2 bananas
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 ice cubes

Blend everything.

Serve to those whose throats could do with a bit of quenching.

Red beet salad with vinaigrette

The smells of the Catalan beef stew prompted me to make another dish redolent of the past: the vegetable soup based on beef stock that I have seen made at my grandmother's and mother's a thousand times on weekends (see next post). Meanwhile I prepared myself a small beet appetizer, again from Françoise Bernard, but hardly a gesture to need a book for.

Serves 4

1 big cooked red beet, diced in small cubes

For the vinaigrette:
salt
pepper
1 tablespoon vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil

Whisk these ingredients vigorously, then pour over the diced beet. Decorate with a salad leaf or cress.

All winter I stored cooked beets all in my fridge, without ever touching them. Until now. So something must be stirring among dull roots.

Steak in Stew, Catalan style

More snow this weekend, more short-lived Winter Wonderland, so another wintry recipe for whoever stayed indoors. In the recently quoted Leviathan of a cookbook, French cooking by Françoise Bernard, I was taken with this Catalan stew which oddly uses steak meat. Let's see how that turns out.

Steak in Stew, Catalan style

Serves 4

4 round pieces of beef (one per person)
4 carrots
2 onions
800 g potatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
30 g butter
20 cl dry white wine (1 glass)
2 tablespoons tomato puree
1 bouquet garni (herbs: bay leaf, thyme)
salt, pepper

Cut carrots and onions in slices. Peel potatoes and cut in slices of 1 cm.

Fry the beef in a pan in very hot oil until browned on both sides.

Transfer the meat to a stewing pot with the carrots, onions, potatoes and the butter. Stew for a few minutes over low heat, then add the wine, tomato puree, herbs, salt and pepper. Put the lid on and let stew for 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Notes: Great dish for leftovers, with smells redolent somehow of the simple cooking seen at my grandmother's. The tomato is a great little tastemaker here.
Beware: on account of the potatoes added raw, this dish needs as long to stew.
It wasn't specified what part of beef to use, so I used steak meat. Puzzling!

Choucroute or Sauerkraut

This winter has been riddled for me with heating problems. As I type this, my cold fingers are trying to withstand the last moments of 9 °C temperature in my home, ever since the heat waned since early morning yesterday, until the technician comes with the spare part and a solution. Even with a cosy temperature indoors, Sauerkraut or choucroute is perfect on the menu, not in the least because of the variety of inane meats one rarely has, but also because the salted and fermented cabbage is a vitamin C bomb.

Here is a healthy way of preparing it. Unlike Ukrainians, I don't ferment the cabbage from scratch, but I don't follow instructions on the package either.

The cabbage (300 g)
Instead of boiling the ready-made fermented cabbage in water, I stew it softly in its own juices. Add a couple of juniper berries.

The meat:
Casseler ham
Bacon
Frankfurters

Instead of frying the meat, here's a method for preparing ham Florentine style, from Françoise Bernard's 1000 recipes of French cooking.

Preheat the oven at 70 °C.

Put the meat in an oven dish.

Take one glass of port, and pour it over the meat.

Put the oven dish in the oven, cover it, and let this cook for 25 minutes.

Note: I used a great Italian aperitivo called Punt e mes instead of port.

Remove your mittens and eat.

Pumpkin Gratin

Another year, another time for cooking 101: with Cuisine: 1000 recettes/recipes by Françoise Bernard. A present. I sighed in desperation: I've long run out of storage space for cookbooks. But I was quickly won over by the simplicity of the descriptions and pictures, which lure one into action. This pumpkin gratin was almost a no brainer for my brain that is quite unable to store recipes. Almost. So this shiny cookbook did take some spitter spatter.

Pumpkin Gratin

Serves 4

1 kg pumpkin, diced
3 big potatoes, diced
1 onion, chopped
30 g butter
80 g grated cheese (I used parmesan)
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
salt
olive oil

The recipe calls for boiling the pumpkin, potatoes and onion for 25 minutes in some water, but my method is stewing veggies in their own juices with just a little olive oil. This takes longer, about 40-45 minutes, but saves a lot of flavor.

Preheat the oven at 250 °C (yes, 250 °C, very high)

Remove the veggies from the heat. Mash to purée consistency. Add 2/3 of the butter and 1/3 of the cheese to the puree, and mix it in well.

Oil an oven tin, pour in the vegetable purée and add the bread crumbs + 1/3 of the cheese on top. Divide the remaining 1/3 of butter in little nibs on top.

Put in the oven, "for a few minutes" the recipe says, under the grill. This takes a good 10-15 minutes, but do watch your oven.

On a day with temperatures knee-deep in minus, a good dish to share with friends.