Thursday, September 26, 2002

I had made a resolution to start off the week.  Just because I was Mastering the Art of French Cooking – 536 recipes in 365 days, one girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen – and just because my crap government job had transformed suddenly into a crap-slash-insanely stressful, ulcer-causing government job, didn’t mean I had to go crazy.  It was all a matter of planning ahead.  I had to give some consideration to “the order of battle”, to use one of JC’s turns of phrase that I like to think she picked up during her years working for the OSS. So.  On Monday I took a page from my friend Amanda’s book.  She had considerately suggested using the leftover bits of pate brisee and freezing them, so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch every time I made a quiche.  Quiche Aux Oignons was up on Monday, so I pulled the frozen ball of pastry dough out of the fridge, beat it a bit with the rolling pin, and rolled it out.  It was a little stiff, but I got it rolled out eventually, and into the quiche pan. I put it back in the refrigerator while I mixed up the filling. 2 pounds of minced onions.  Ha ha!  This is what Cuisinarts are for!  The peeling and quartering took about ten minutes; the mincing approximately 45 seconds.  No problem!  Of course, as usual, I had not sufficiently read the directions ahead of time, and it turns out the onions have to cook in butter slowly for an hour.  Shit.  Well, this would give me a little time to do the stuff I’d brought home from work.  Sigh.  Oh, and mix myself and my dear patient husband a little toddy.  Or maybe my have my dear patient husband mix one for me…. In any case, the onions cooked for an hour, slowly, and began giving off that sweet, mellow caramelized onion smell.  I think I worked a little.  I baked the pastry shell. Only something happened wrong with the pastry.  Maybe I just left it in too long.  Or maybe something odd had happened to it in the freezer.  It came out of the oven looking like a saltine cracker – bumpy and slightly browned and dry as a bone.  Hm.  Well, it was good enough for government work.  It would have to be. When I’d put the onions – seven cups of minced onions – into the pan, I had thought, “This is a hell of a lot of onions.  Well, they’ll shrink as they cook down.”  But not so much, really.  After an hour the onions were yellow and melting and sweet, and there was about seven cups of them.  Luckily for my poor dry pastry shell, there’s not much in Quiche Aux Oignons except onions.  A couple of egg yolks and 2/3 cup cream get mixed up with them and the stuff gets poured into the shell.  Then a sprinkling of cheese on top, a dotting of butter on top, and half an hour in the oven.  We ate the quiche at approximately 9:30 – so much for eating earlier – along with a bottle of Cote du Rhone and a green salad.  The salad – never would I have thought I could so enjoy raw greenery – was much-needed, but not nearly enough.  Lettuce didn’t stand a chance.  The quiche tasted like two pounds of onions.  It was great, don’t get me wrong, but there was so much onion that it sublimated directly from our mouths to the pores of our skin and by bedtime we were sweating onion juice.  7:46:36 AM    comment []