Carmelized Onion Tart

I don't really understand it when people say that they hate to cook for just themselves. I love it. I feel none of the responsibility of feeding and pleasing other people when I cook just for me. I can eat crappy food if I really want to OR I can get really creative OR I can make something that takes a bit longer to make but which makes me happy without thinking about other people getting hungry, while I'm taking my sweet-a$$ time making dinner. Tonight's dinner falls into all of those categories above, Tim's away, so in the kitchen I was, getting to play. And I decided I wanted to make a tart, unfortunately (or is it fortunately, because it ended up being delicious!!) I didn't have much to put in the tart.

Sooo, I caramelized some onions, managed to make the most out of the rest of my rind of parmesan and chopped up a few kalamatas from the oversized Costco jar (best Costco purchase ever - we go through those things like water) and wrapped it all up in a delicious extra-buttery free form tart crust (which I added spelt flour to, out of guilt for the amount of butter I used).

This is kind of like an even worse version of Pissaladiere, one of my favourite pizzas, but with more crust (and a way more buttery version at that) and I held off on the anchovies - thinking that the kalamatas were salty enough. Although in retrospect, seeing as Tim was away, I perhaps should have taken the opportunity to get my anchovy fix in. Feel free to add a few, anchovies only make things better, I swear!


Caramelized Onions:
3-4 large onions, sliced thinly
salt and pepper,
olive oil and butter
thyme
1 tbsp. good quality balsamic vinegar

Heat olive oil and butter (however much you want, I did about a tbsp of each) in a frying pan and add your onions. Season this with salt and pepper. Set to medium-low, cover and leave it for a good 15-20 mins. stirring occasionally. You want the onions to soften. Once this accomplished, uncover it, add about a tsp of thyme if using dry or a tbsp if using fresh stuff, and turn up the heat to medium. You'll want to stir it occasionally to end up with a lovely golden brown mess of delicious caramelized yumminess. This will probably take another good 15 mins. Right at the end, add your balsamic vinegar - the more stars your vinegar has the better for this part - you want to enhance the sweetness, not make it acidic. Meanwhile, you can work on your tart crust.

Savoury Spelt Tart Crust:

3/4 c. white flour
1/2 c. spelt flour (you can sub in any other whole grain flour, but spelt is delicious)
1/2 tsp. salt
10 tbsp. or a 11/4 sticks of unsalted butter, frozen or refrigerated and cut into small chunks
1 egg yolk
2-3 tbsp. cold water

Place flours and salt in a food processor and process until combined. Add all of the butter at once and buzz away, until the butter has been distributed evenly in the flour. (My food processor is a little intense, so it ends up being like large bits of sand, rather than the more common consistency of peas.) Add the egg yolk and blend. Dump it all into a bowl and work the water into it, until it just sticks together. You might need to add a bit more. Form a disc of the dough and wrap that in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for a minimum of 10 minutes.

To assemble:

Caramelized Onions
Tart Crust
1/3 cup chopped kalamatas
Parmesan or other delicious cheese to taste

Preheat your oven to 450F. Roll out your dough to about a quarter inch consistency, in a roughly circular shape. Grate some cheese into the centre of the dough, leaving yourself enough room to fold the pastry over onto itself. Pile your onions and kalamatas onto that and then fold over your pastry. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it can be roughly circular (or polygonal in my case) what matters is that all is contained because it will taste great in any shape you end up with - I kind of like that it ends up looking like a windmill. You can grate a little extra cheese over the top of this.  Stick it in the oven on a cookie sheet or a piece of parchment on a pizza stone like I did and cook for up to 30 minutes or more. Keep an eye on it when its all toasty brown its done.

And then enjoy with a salad or with a delightful saute of cauliflower and kale, like I did. Magnifico!

A Few of My Favourite Things

Just a few things that I've been really diggin' lately.

Photo Courtesy: thisweekfordinner.com, 2010.

The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a serious Mark Bittman recipe groupie. My wonderful little brother happened to (unknowingly of my Bittman obsession) buy me his How to Cook Everything  and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian a few Christmases ago and with that there was no turning back. In those cookbooks, Bittman has the most wonderful basic (and complex variations) on anything you could possibly want to cook and his newest cookbook doesn't disappoint. With a new ethical philosophy on eating responsibly - for the planet, society and our own bodies - that is of course in Bittman-esque simplicity incredibly straightforward, i.e. eat less meat and more legumes, replace refined carbohydrates with whole grains and alternative sugars, and don't eat anything you can't pronounce (basically make your own foods). 

Tim and I have gravitated towards eating less meat (flexitarians) for quite sometime now, but this book has made me feel a whole lot less guilty about it -- by explaining the fallacy of the meat = protein equation, once and for all and by explaining how much energy is spent in meat production - it's an incredibly unethical disgusting amount. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good steak every now and then, and thanks to my awesome hunting-gathering/friends-with-organic-farmers parents, much of the meat we do eat is wild or organic. But we are now trying to only eat meat once or twice a week and even then we use it as more of a garnish than the main menu item. A nice side effect has been the reduction of our food bill, as well as getting to try out all kinds of cool new foods - like millet and farro ---- can you say delicious risotto!

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Jane Jacobs, 1961. This edition 1972. Cover photograph by Max Yavno.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: I know, I know, Jane Jacobs seems to be a total trend right now but I have become increasingly attracted to the planning side of heritage and I couldn't not read Jane Jacobs obviously, and it just so happens that I love this book. 

It's actually kind of amazing that Jacobs was writing at the time about things that may seem counterintuitive to what most people think about big cities but make so much sense when you think about them even just a little bit. Like that sidewalks are where social interaction happens, and contrary to the idea that they are dangerous places in the inner city, they are often the safest place to be - especially when they are overlooked by the traditional mix of commercial and residential. Just think about it - if you've more people who think of an area as their own community - they know what are normal events for their sidewalks and what aren't. They will police it without even thinking about it.

Essentially Jacobs makes the case that complex community systems in the inner city really work (i.e. mixed use neighbourhoods) and that the whole of modern planning methods denied this and by separating residential from commercial from industrial you are essentially destroying human ecosystems. I like to think of Jacobs as having a holistic approach to planning - if you have a little bit of everything you are going to win everytime - especially if you ask the people who actually live in those communities which little bits they appreciate and want in their own communities. But this is the huge caveat, you have to ask the people who live in an area what makes their community their own - it might be the local coffee shop but that doesn't mean you should plan on having one in every community. What works in one place  won't necessarily work somewhere else.

P.S. Here's a really cool interview from the CBC archives with Jane Jacobs.

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Photo Courtesy: http://www.cocoandvanilla.com, 2010.

You're gonna be like "What?!" when I mention this next thing but believe me they are delicious and good for you and gluten-free. Right now I am loving Black Bean Brownies. I know it sounds weird and awful but in actuality these are incredibly good, dense, moist, chocolate goodies. Not only do they use legumes in place of flour (increasing your protein potential and making them very filling) they use agave nectar in place of sugar (decreasing your use of refined carbs). I can eat a couple of these itsy bitsy 1 inch brownies for dessert and be totally satiated.

I've also found a recipe I haven't had a chance to try yet that replaces the butter with banana - making these low fat and vegan. Cha-ching.

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Photo Courtesy: © 1999 Dietmar Regensburger/Innsruck

This awesome 5 part Ideas from the CBC on Rene Girard. I had to read some of his literature on the Scapegoat when I was in Theology which I thought was fascinating at the time but then promptly forgot about after the class. But then what do you know, I'm on my way home a few weeks ago and catch the tail end of Ideas (which is generally awesome but which I rarely ever catch) and I hear them talking with Girard about victimization in the modern society. I didn't even realize it was Rene Girard they were talking with but it piqued my interest thoroughly enough for me to seek the archive out on-line and listen to the whole thing during the course of one afternoon. 

Girard is a French academic that has created this all-encompassing system which doesn't fall under any one academic discipline but is an anthropological, philosophical approach to humanity that draws upon ancient literature (the greeks), the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, to form an understanding of the violence inherent in mimetic desire (the competitive desires of individuals towards the same goals).  The interview with him goes over his whole body of work and is a really great listen if you've got 5 hours of free time (it sounds like a lot but you could just replace 1 hour a day of television with a mini-lecture).

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Photo Courtesy: Irene O'Toole, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/JOVMNAcCgKe8zBXVZqLuig

And now my last favourite thing of the moment....vegetable peelings. Yep, you heard right and you may believe that this is somewhat of an anti-climatic ending to this post. With all of the vegetables we've been eating, there seemed to be a lot of waste - and even thought we are lucky enough to live in a place which has green waste pick up - I was still feeling bad about the amount of waste. 

So I've started to keep a couple of freezer bags in the freezer that I fill up with all of my vegetable peelings (from pretty much everything except for the really watery things like tomatoes and cucumbers and don't put the papery skins of onions in - it'll make your stock bitter). After a couple of weeks or sometimes even just one week, I'll boil all of those vegetable peelings and make my own vegetable stock or chicken stock if we've had one recently (after picking the bones I put the carcass in the freezer to save for stock too). I reserve this activity for the weekend, when electricity is cheaper and I have the time to let it simmer on the stove for most of the day. I usually boil up a couple of batches of grains and beans on the weekend as well (in keeping with Food Matters- see above) so that they are easy to toss together during the week - so I'm in and out of the kitchen anyways.

There is still the same amount of waste but at least I'm getting the full nutritive and economic value out of everything and I'm buying way less bouillon cubes and making way more soup. Frugality is the bomb.