” 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.
The Civilized Lunch Project 