” I consider leftovers as treasure, morsels of frugal goodness on which we can snack or feast, depending on the quantity.” — Nigel Slater
If you enjoy reading about cooking from someone who can truly evoke the pleasures of puttering about the kitchen and working on an intuitive level, I highly encourage you to dive into the delicious prose of Nigel Slater. His book Notes from the Larder is the type of tome you might just leave by your bedside (or on a kitchen work table) from here to eternity. His quote about leftovers is something that resonates with me. I love staring into the depths of my refrigerator to see what unforgotten morsels await reinvention.
It’s especially satisfying to make something decadent out of a vegetable that’s about to go south, or a half stick of butter, buried under a chunk of foil-wrapped cheese. A prime example of a dish that feels a bit like a magic trick, as if you’re making something out of “nothing,” is the french onion soup galette developed by chef Su Li. (Because I always seem to have onions hanging around.)
Normally I’m not big on how-to cooking videos, but this one with Li is full of useful tips that I’ve never seen anywhere else, including her genius move of blending pie dough ingredients (if they are a tad dry) wrapped in plastic wrap with a rolling pin. What?! So smart, right? I would link you to the recipe in the NY Times, but their paywall might block you from viewing it. So, I’ll just summarize here:
Ingredients: 1/2 a stick of unsalted butter, 3-4 big onions (I used Walla Walla sweets), beef broth, sherry (or sherry vinegar), salt, and pepper.
Melt the butter in a cast iron skillet and cook the onions until they are caramelized. Add small amounts of beef broth and cook until any excess liquid has evaporated. Add sherry, salt and pepper to taste. I won’t go into detail about the onion prep as Li covers that thoroughly in her video. As much as I liked her tip about blending pie crust ingredients, I still wasn’t that smitten with her crust. So, a few days later I made another onion tart using Stella Parks’ No-Stress, Super-Flaky Pie Crust. Yo! It is a game changer.
The funny thing is, her ingredients are all the very ones I’ve been using for the last two decades. The only difference is that she recommends 1 and 3/4 cups of flour. For years and years and years, I’ve been making pies with 2 cups of flour. Well, apparently a quarter-cup less flour is the difference between pretty good and sublime.
I hope you get inspired and try this. If I was going to offer a guarantee for a recipe recommendation, this is the one I’d put my reputation behind. It’s time consuming, but it’s easy. So, you’ve got to be in the right mood for slow-cooking. Ideally the sun would be shining and maybe you’ve just gotten back from a bicycle ride or working in your garden. You feel like listening to the radio or some jazz, enjoying a glass of wine, and meditating on onions in a skillet as they transform from translucent to golden brown.
Thanksgiving is definitely one of my favorite holidays. I love that it’s steeped in tradition, yet open to evolution. Say you feel strongly that you must have sweet potatoes or turkey or cornbread stuffing. That’s only natural. After all, those are highlights of the season. But hopefully your family (or friends) are flexible enough to indulge new recipes and twists on the classics. If that’s not the case, well, my sympathies.
I personally would not be happy making the same damn recipes year after year. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. But I realize that for some, the constancy is absolutely sacred and reassuring. I get it. I do. I just don’t feel tradition-bound. Especially this year. In the midst of this pandemic, which has blown all normalcy to shreds, it seemed cheerier to forsake tradition altogether. No nostalgia permitted.
This year, the pandemic also meant skipping my decades-long T. Day celebration with friends. While that was a hard thing to forgo, I loved my get-together with my dad and stepmom. We not only put some twists on the classics, we also changed up how we went about eating: I suggested a day’s worth of small plates, punctuated by festive cocktails. It was great!
The idea of consuming a big Thanksgiving feast in one fell swoop has always seemed rather depressing to me. I mean, you cook for hours (or days) in advance, and all of that work disappears in a flash. It’s just not right. On the flip side, a parade of small plates stretches out the conversation and ups the anticipation. At the end, you still feel very full and slightly guilty about all of the calories, but it’s a lot more civilized.
I also found that the odds of having more leftovers increase when you switch to a small-plates style of dining. And this, of course, if very good news when it comes to options for a civilized lunch.
Today I had not one, but two slices of my leftover caramelized onion and squash tart. You guys! It is soooooo good! It’s a fairly labor-intensive recipe. But, if you can get into a meditative rhythm and embrace the sauteeing of onions and the endless chopping of squash and sweet potatoes, you’ll be OK.
Plus, it’s so worth it. This is a beautiful looking tart . I don’t own a springform tart pan, so I just used a glass pie pan. But, I want to make it again with the tart pan. There’s no doubt that the right equipment would make the presentation even more beautiful.
The Civilized Lunch Project 