French Onion Soup5 November, 2009

French Onion Soup

I love soup. I love soup. I love soup.

I’ve spent the past fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to write this post about. Sure, my writing’s rusty as it is, but I’ve just deleted a couple of paragraphs where I’ve waxed poetic about soup and its virtues (all-in-one supermeal! liquidified for your convenience! Warm and comforting! You can put anything in it!)

Appetizing, huh?

So instead I’m going to tell you about why I decided to make this soup:

  1. I love France!
  2. I love onions!
  3. I love soup!

Pretty obvious, right?

Chopped Onions

No, okay, seriously I made this soup because I felt like curling up with a bowl of something warm and yummy, and well, tea just wouldn’t cut it. And I hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a couple of days so my fridge was lacking any kind of produce. But I had onions! So I made French onion soup. This recipe is based on a recipe I found in a book by Angela Nilsen called The Ultimate Recipe Book. The idea behind the book is quite cool. Basically what Angela Nilsen did is take some classic all-time favorite foods and try to come up with the best possible recipe for each one. She did this through trial and error and by interviewing other chefs about their secrets and tips for each recipe. I changed her recipe around a bit to make it (a) vegetarian and (b) fully home-made (hers called for tins of beef consommé).

French Onion Soup

The soup was great reheated the next day. The onions mellowed out even more, and the harshness of the alcohol was gone and all that was left behind was the most wonderful, rounded-out flavor. I recommend you make this soup the day before you want to serve it as that’s when it’s at its best.

Bon apetit!

French Onion Soup - Recipe Card

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Balsamic Roast Pumpkin1 November, 2009

Balsamic Roast Pumpkin

Yesterday was Halloween and R. and I spent it lounging around the house doing, well, not much. I didn’t make anything too Halloween inspired—no cupcakes with orange frosting, no cookies shaped like cats or ghouls, and no stew with eyeballs—I was far too lazy and I could only bring myself to make something really simple. So I roasted a pumpkin. I guess you could say it’s sort of Halloween-y but let’s be honest here: I was just too darn lazy to make anything particularly inspired.

Pumpkin

What’s good about this though is that it turned out absolutely delicious. R. and I ate it with a salad of rocket and baby spinach and some parma ham and sour cream. It was a lovely, simple lunch and incredibly easy to make.

Enjoy!

Balsamic Roast Pumpkin - Recipe Card

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Happy Halloween!29 October, 2009

Eat lots of candy, dress up in a ridiculous costume, and have fun! It’s the one day of the year you get to be 5 again…enjoy!

Jack-o-lanterns

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Ah, Italy! Part II (and a recipe for pasta carbonara)28 October, 2009

Italy - Umbria

Let me tell you a bit more about our trip to Italy this summer.

It was wonderful pretty much sums it up.

We ate SO much. There was good food to be had at every turn—in every house, restaurant, café, streetside market, everywhere. I don’t think we had a single bad meal the entire time we were there.

There were afternoons spent drinking beer and eating greasy, more-ish pizza in Rome, evenings being served the house special—bucatini in tomato sauce—with a giant bib and a good pitcher of the house red. There were cheerful waiters and disgruntled ones, large restaurants and small, family-run trattorias. There were restaurants with menus, and those where your guess was as good as anyone else’s as to what you’d be served that day. There were picnics and slices of pizza eaten by the side of the street. The variable that remained constant was that the food and the house wine were always good.

tomatoes, olives, ham, salami, truffle salsa, pecorino, zucchini flowers

tomatoes, olives, ham, salami, truffle salsa, pecorino, zucchini flowers

We moved around a lot, but we made sure to visit some of our favorite places: Trento, Verona, Venice, Rome, and a few other places here and there.

We spent the longest time in Umbria (this region of Italy) where the weather was glorious, and the hospitality charming. This is the place we stayed at, in a town called Bevagna:

BEVAGNA 2009

BEVAGNA 09 Cat

Isn’t it adorable? We had our own kitchen too, which meant we were able to buy all of the wonderful local produce and make some amazing meals, like this one:

BEVAGNA 09 food

Yum!

The people there were really wonderful and took the time to show us around and invite us for wonderful meals in their homes.

In Bevagna there is an annual medieval festival where the entire town gets decorated with faux-stone facades, the townspeople dress up in medieval clothes and parade across the town and an old-fashioned market is recreated. The town gets divided into four quarters, just as it used to be, and each quarter sets up a tavern of sorts, where medieval food is cooked and served to diners.

BEVAGNA 09 medievel 1BEVAGNA 09 medieval 2

R. had this (I wish I could remember what it’s called, but I lost my copy of the menu) which was very similar to a modern spaghetti carbonara, but without the eggs.

Medieval Carbonara

Here’s our version. The trick is not making the eggs scramble. We found that if you add a bit of the pasta water it helps give you a nice, smooth, satiny sauce.

Carbonara

Enjoy!

Pasta Carbonara Recipe

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Courgette, Mint, and Feta Frittata24 October, 2009

Courgette Frittata

Okay, so I don’t have a nice, long, thought-out post for you today about how I: went to the farmer’s market and found one great ingredient that made this recipe/found a method of cooking that revolutionized the way I do things in the kitchen/read a cookbook that inspired me to make something new and adventurous.

I was hungry, and I just had to eat right away so I needed to make something quick.

The ingredients in this frittata are serendipitous—they’re just about everything that happened to be in my fridge, and they worked great together. So I took a couple of photos and wrote down what I did.

I know. I know. But it tastes good!

You might think that there’s too much courgette in this, but it makes the frittata moist and fulfilling—I hate it when it’s too eggy. You’ll also notice that I transfer the courgettes from one pan to another; that’s just because it’s best not to overcrowd them while they’re cooking.

Enjoy!

Frittata - Recipe Card

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