Behind on weeks, oh well. Will catch up this weekend. Did a lamb/lentil/tomato stew dish finally. 32oz diced tomato/16oz lamb/1cup lentils/2cups stocks in instant pot for 35 mins, tumeric heavy spice blend.
Lentils fill out the mouthfeel a lot but it probably needs a carb to sit on. Didn't add any heat and kind of wish I had. Acidity is a touch high but acceptable. Still need to dial in coriander/cumin levels, might need to add paprika or ancho chile or something, I was doing a heavy cinnamon flavor in lamb stuff for a while but Tumsboo hates savory cinnamon dishes.
For something that you dump in and hit go, worked out well. Less fussy than dried chickpeas I think.
We really want to make the Enchiladas, but this has been a crazy week and we had a huge pot of Sweet and Sour chicken soup to eat before it turns so I've had that three days this week :P
Ingredients:
Enough onions to fill slow cooker to brim.
Bit of oil
French bread
Stock
2 table flour
bay leaf
splash of soy sauce
splash of worchestershire sauce
bit of garlic powder
pepper
salt
chives for garnish
Caramelized onions:
Place onions in fridge to chill.
Sharpen knife.
cover bottom of slow cooker with oil.
Slice enough onions to fill slow cooker. (Roughly 3 lbs.)
Add oil, and mix to coat.
Place slow cooker on low, and leave for around 9 hours.
Stir every so often. You need to stir more often until the onions have formed a pool of liquid.
The soup:
Add a bit of stock/water to slow cooker, and get any fond off the sides. (Wasn't much.)
Transfer to actual saucepan, and add remaining ingredients except chives and French bread.
Heat to simmer.
The bread:
Preheat oven to 400 F
Slice French bread, and place on cookie sheet
drizzle with oil, flip and repeat
cook for about 5 minutes
Notes:
So Many Onions. As someone who doesn't like cutting up onions, this is a big hurdle to making this recipe. Most other recipes just need one.
I prefer not to have alcohol, which means I had to substitute stock. I think this worked, but I'm probably missing out on some flavor notes.
Can't eat dairy, so no cheese on top. I think this is a significant loss of flavor, and I wasn't able to find a good substitute. Unfortunate.
While I put the bread on top to match the traditional preparation, if you can't use cheese I would instead suggest preparing extra bread, putting it on a plate, and using the soup like dip. That's what I did with all the bread off-camera.
Apparently, caramelized onions freeze well, and the other bits aren't as big of a deal. If you're not sure how to time this, I'd just caramelize and freeze the onions, then make the actual soup another day.
I'm not sure the onions caramelized completely, mostly because I haven't done that before, so I don't know what they taste like. They browned nicely, but there's still a bit of crunch left. If I did this again, I'd probably make it the traditional way and refrigerate/freeze.
This isn't going to make great leftovers, since the French bread is an important component. I tossed in some frozen green onions so there's at least something there besides caramelized onions.
Final thoughts:
I probably won't make this again. It's a lot of work, I'm not sure it really works without the cheese, the flavor is a bit too subtle for my tastes, and eating it over multiple days doesn't work well.
On the plus side, now I know what French Onion Soup tastes like. This isn't something I'd try at a restaurant, because of the dairy, and it's not something I would have made for myself without a really good excuse, because of how much work it is.
as for what to do with the extra soup, I've enjoyed making it into dips, you can always reduce down the soup if its too much liquid, and mix it into cream cheese, or sour cream for a nice veggie dip. I've also had nice success with extra rosemary and blending it into hummus for a vegan dip as well.
going with only stock and no wine really takes the flavor profile away. reduced wine in general adds depth and flavor extremely well, its a foundation for flavor.
I've used beer instead of wine to give it an aged* flavor, Non alcoholic beer might be a nice substitute there in addition to the stock.
The stuff I've read about french onion soup is that you cook those onions for literally as long as possible, like 4+ hours. You basically want them to be jelly.
A lot of recipes were developed using commercial stovetops so how long it takes to caramelize the onions to what you want in this soup at home is severely underestimated. Alton's is closer to the mark but some people want really caramelized onions so there's still a lot of variance in times.
It should not take 9 hours to carmelize onions and they should not be crunchy (unless you want them that way).
Functionally they should just taste like sugar because what you’re doing is cooking all the carbs in them until all that is left is sugar. You’re making jam, essentially. Onion jam.
1) Cut your onions however you want. Doesn’t freaking matter. Well not quite. If you chop the onions fine they will jam faster. If you chop them in strips it takes longer and you have more texture.
Or do both!
2) cook dem onions. Put butter (or oil) in a pan and cook em until they’re brown and wilted. Stir occasionally and deglaze the pan with water.
3) do that until you have a jam. The time this takes depends largely on how many onions you can get into your pan and not like... anything else.
4) if you want some more chunky bits add those strips of onion in the middle and cook em until they’re as soft as you want em. The jam ain’t going anywhere at this point.
It takes me maybe an hour or two to do the long version that cooks the onions to different consistencies. Maybe an hour to an hour and a half for a really jammy onion. Maybe 45 minutes for just slightly sweet and soft onions
I was following a slow cooker recipe that actually needs that long. In retrospect, I don't think the slow cooker method works, or maybe 9 hours isn't long enough. (They weren't crunchy, they just had some remaining texture, and I wouldn't call it a jam. I think this matches up with "slightly sweet and soft", though.)
In other news, leftover french onion soup works fine when served on top of toast, sloppy joe style.
I wanted to make French onion soup, but the store only sold Spanish onions.
:P
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited March 2021
I don’t think it’s possible to properly caramelize a whole onion in less than an hour, and you probably gotta add an extra 30 minutes for each additional onion
Onions are tedious fuckers, but worth it. Remember to use your vent-a-hood or prepare to cry like it’s the ending of Old Yeller.
I was following a slow cooker recipe that actually needs that long. In retrospect, I don't think the slow cooker method works, or maybe 9 hours isn't long enough. (They weren't crunchy, they just had some remaining texture, and I wouldn't call it a jam. I think this matches up with "slightly sweet and soft", though.)
In other news, leftover french onion soup works fine when served on top of toast, sloppy joe style.
It's definitely the slow cooker. At low settings, they don't heat things up past the boiling point of water and you really need to exceed that to make the sugars caramelize.
You may recall I had troubles with getting my increadibly coarse bread to rise properly, and it was suggested that I try with baking powder instead. I did.
I skipped the honey and yeast, and added four tea spoons baking powder.
The experiment was not successful.
From the first picture you can see it looks OK. But from the second, you can see that the baking powder bread (front) actually rose less than the bread with yeast (back).
The baking powder bread also had worse structural integrity and tasted worse (probably due to the no honey part).
I made French onion soup yesterday based on a recipie in my cookbook. I substituted crutons for French bread, and skipped the wine (I did not have any). I also used vegetable stock rather than beef stock (it was that or fish stock…).
Fry the onions until golden
Add everything except bread/crutons and cheese, and simmer for 15 min
Pour into oven-proof bowl, pour in bread/crutons and cover with cheese
Put in oven at 250 C for 10 min.
Honestly, I found it too sweet. Definitely happy to have tried, though; always wanted to try FOS.
I feel like wine and beef stock are both really necessary to balance the extremely sweet onions.
Pretty sure a restaurant I've eaten at did a soup with chicken or vegetable stock but they also added a variety of mushrooms too which adds a lot of flavor.
I finally went to the store for the first time in a month (seriously, I was surprised at how long it's been) and picked up the ingredients for hot dogs.
Hot dog + bun
mustard
relish
white onion
tomato
pickle
pickled peppers (Pepperoncini)
celery seed
Boil water, put hot dogs in, reduce heat, and wait 5 minutes.
Dice the white onion and peppers and put aside.
Slice the tomato and put aside.
Put all ingredients and hot dog on bun.
Thoughts:
* My goal was less to create something that might be called "authentic" and more to try out some ingredients I normally wouldn't put on hot dogs.
* The buns I used were not up to this task.
* Taste-wise, the pickled peppers and onion were the obvious winners. The peppers added a nice bit of heat, and the onions added crunch.
* The celery seed didn't do much; I mixed it in with the peppers just to get a more even distribution, which I think worked well, but I don't think I added enough.
* The pickle seemed redundant with the relish, and I'm not going to include it tomorrow. (Something needed to be cut for the sake of structural integrity.)
* I intend to cut up the peppers a bit finer next time. I just cut them into chunks, and probably should have diced them.
* The white onion was much too large; I'm going to have leftovers. I'm thinking shallots might be a better choice for a mild onion flavor without needing to deal with still having 3/4s of an onion left over.
* The tomato was fine, and is actually sized properly for this task. I sliced it in half, then sliced it into strips.
* This does have a good taste, with a nice variety of flavors.
If nothing else, next time I get ingredients for hot dogs, I'll probably buy some shallots as well, and cut up some pickled peppers from the fridge.
Thankfully I checked the thread this afternoon; this took a while to prepare, and doing so during the week would have been annoying.
Chicken Pot Pie:
Crust:
2.5c (330g) flour
1/2 tea salt
1 tea sugar
1c coconut oil
1/3c ice water (Roughly. Make more.)
Combine flour, salt, and sugar
Add coconut oil, and hand mix
Add water a bit at a time until the dough starts looking like dough.
Flatten a bit, wrap with cling wrap, and place in fridge for 30 minutes.
Cut in half, roll out each half to size and shape of pan, one a bit larger for the bottom and sides. (You can reuse the cling wrap for covering the pan.)
Place larger piece in pan, cut off any excess and use to patch any shortcomings.
Place smaller piece on a baking sheet, cover both with cling wrap, and put in the fridge.
Filling:
1 large yellow onion, chopped
bit of oil
1/2 lb precooked shredding frozen chicken
1 can corn (I drained mine; you can get away with not draining it, but watch the sodium, and check for any preservatives.)
Frozen celery (you can use whatever veggies you feel like. I used what I had.)
Frozen peas
Frozen carrots
1/3c flour
2/3c milk (Oat milk in my case. The type doesn't matter.)
Garlic powder
Thyme
Rosemary
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Water
Preheat oven to 425 F. Also, make sure there's a lower shelf in the oven.
Chop onion and add to pan with oil.
Cook until translucent.
Add chicken and vegetables. Cook until unfrozen.
Add flour and stir in.
Add milk and stir in.
Add seasonings.
Add water a bit at a time until the thickness looks right. I aimed for thick stew.
Spoon into pan until almost full, cover with top piece. (You can reuse the cling wrap for putting on the pie when putting it into the fridge after dinner.)
Poke holes in the top. Make it look fancy if you want.
Cook for 40 minutes at 425 F. Use the bottom shelf in the oven to make sure the bottom stays crispy.
Let sit for 10 minutes.
Notes:
* This is interesting to me mostly because of the crust. I can't eat most premade pies, and sometimes I feel like eating pie. I've known that it's possible to make non-dairy pie crusts for a while now, I just couldn't be bothered to actually try that out, and this was a good push.
* The texture of the crust is a bit closer to shortbread than flaky, like many non-dairy pastries, but it's still good.
* Turns out I don't have a round pie tin. It's like I don't make pies.... I used a 6"x10" baking dish instead.
* This uses a lot of coconut oil, which is somewhat expensive. If I wanted to make this more often, I would want to find a cheaper non-dairy source of saturated fat. (I haven't bothered with this before, because I don't go through saturated fat quickly enough to matter, and coconut oil is shelf-stable. Also, it looks like I grabbed the expensive coconut oil, which didn't help the price.)
* The actual crust can be prepared, then refrigerate or freeze and do the actual pie later on.
* It's not really a weekday dish. Even if using a premade shell, there's still at least an hour from start to putting it on the table.
* I made the top crust when I needed it, just before baking. This was a mistake; I should have made both at the same time, and put the top on a baking sheet in the fridge. The top crust dried out a bit, and was difficult to roll out. (I also just left it in the bowl and covered the bowl instead of wrapping it with cling film, which didn't help.) I'm going to call the top crust "rustic".
* It is difficult to measure out the exact quantities needed; I had extra filling and bits of crust left. The filling, after cooling down, went into ice cube trays to freeze for later. The crust bits got put on a baking sheet in the oven for about 6 minutes, then eaten while waiting for the actual pot pie.
* Don't forget to poke holes in the top of the crust. I almost forgot, not that my "rustic" top crust is airtight or anything.
Final thoughts:
Except for the oops on the top crust, this came out quite well for a first try. The bottom crust stayed crisp, the filling was flavorful, and I don't see any other obvious improvements. I don't like how you'll probably have leftover crust and filling, and there's a few too many steps for me to be enthusiastic about making this again, but that's my feeling about most non-weekday food.
It's ugly, and I with I had egg washed the crust, but damn if this isn't the best chicken pot pie I've ever had.
I used the basic Betty Crocker recipe as the basis, just a white rue with homemade veggie stock and milk. It was pretty simple, green onion, celery, shallot, carrot, potato, and chicken thighs.
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Lentils fill out the mouthfeel a lot but it probably needs a carb to sit on. Didn't add any heat and kind of wish I had. Acidity is a touch high but acceptable. Still need to dial in coriander/cumin levels, might need to add paprika or ancho chile or something, I was doing a heavy cinnamon flavor in lamb stuff for a while but Tumsboo hates savory cinnamon dishes.
For something that you dump in and hit go, worked out well. Less fussy than dried chickpeas I think.
It’s really, really good. The lemon zest was a great touch.
Enough onions to fill slow cooker to brim.
Bit of oil
French bread
Stock
2 table flour
bay leaf
splash of soy sauce
splash of worchestershire sauce
bit of garlic powder
pepper
salt
chives for garnish
Caramelized onions:
Place onions in fridge to chill.
Sharpen knife.
cover bottom of slow cooker with oil.
Slice enough onions to fill slow cooker. (Roughly 3 lbs.)
Add oil, and mix to coat.
Place slow cooker on low, and leave for around 9 hours.
Stir every so often. You need to stir more often until the onions have formed a pool of liquid.
The soup:
Add a bit of stock/water to slow cooker, and get any fond off the sides. (Wasn't much.)
Transfer to actual saucepan, and add remaining ingredients except chives and French bread.
Heat to simmer.
The bread:
Preheat oven to 400 F
Slice French bread, and place on cookie sheet
drizzle with oil, flip and repeat
cook for about 5 minutes
Notes:
So Many Onions. As someone who doesn't like cutting up onions, this is a big hurdle to making this recipe. Most other recipes just need one.
I prefer not to have alcohol, which means I had to substitute stock. I think this worked, but I'm probably missing out on some flavor notes.
Can't eat dairy, so no cheese on top. I think this is a significant loss of flavor, and I wasn't able to find a good substitute. Unfortunate.
While I put the bread on top to match the traditional preparation, if you can't use cheese I would instead suggest preparing extra bread, putting it on a plate, and using the soup like dip. That's what I did with all the bread off-camera.
Apparently, caramelized onions freeze well, and the other bits aren't as big of a deal. If you're not sure how to time this, I'd just caramelize and freeze the onions, then make the actual soup another day.
I'm not sure the onions caramelized completely, mostly because I haven't done that before, so I don't know what they taste like. They browned nicely, but there's still a bit of crunch left. If I did this again, I'd probably make it the traditional way and refrigerate/freeze.
This isn't going to make great leftovers, since the French bread is an important component. I tossed in some frozen green onions so there's at least something there besides caramelized onions.
Final thoughts:
I probably won't make this again. It's a lot of work, I'm not sure it really works without the cheese, the flavor is a bit too subtle for my tastes, and eating it over multiple days doesn't work well.
On the plus side, now I know what French Onion Soup tastes like. This isn't something I'd try at a restaurant, because of the dairy, and it's not something I would have made for myself without a really good excuse, because of how much work it is.
going with only stock and no wine really takes the flavor profile away. reduced wine in general adds depth and flavor extremely well, its a foundation for flavor.
I've used beer instead of wine to give it an aged* flavor, Non alcoholic beer might be a nice substitute there in addition to the stock.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BretonBrawler
Maybe an hour, hour and a half.
The Good Eats one is a very very good base recipe to start with: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/french-onion-soup-recipe-1939059
A lot of recipes were developed using commercial stovetops so how long it takes to caramelize the onions to what you want in this soup at home is severely underestimated. Alton's is closer to the mark but some people want really caramelized onions so there's still a lot of variance in times.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
It should not take 9 hours to carmelize onions and they should not be crunchy (unless you want them that way).
Functionally they should just taste like sugar because what you’re doing is cooking all the carbs in them until all that is left is sugar. You’re making jam, essentially. Onion jam.
1) Cut your onions however you want. Doesn’t freaking matter. Well not quite. If you chop the onions fine they will jam faster. If you chop them in strips it takes longer and you have more texture.
Or do both!
2) cook dem onions. Put butter (or oil) in a pan and cook em until they’re brown and wilted. Stir occasionally and deglaze the pan with water.
3) do that until you have a jam. The time this takes depends largely on how many onions you can get into your pan and not like... anything else.
4) if you want some more chunky bits add those strips of onion in the middle and cook em until they’re as soft as you want em. The jam ain’t going anywhere at this point.
It takes me maybe an hour or two to do the long version that cooks the onions to different consistencies. Maybe an hour to an hour and a half for a really jammy onion. Maybe 45 minutes for just slightly sweet and soft onions
In other news, leftover french onion soup works fine when served on top of toast, sloppy joe style.
Yaaay! Is that the lentil and orzo stew with eggplant? I love it!
Onions are tedious fuckers, but worth it. Remember to use your vent-a-hood or prepare to cry like it’s the ending of Old Yeller.
It's definitely the slow cooker. At low settings, they don't heat things up past the boiling point of water and you really need to exceed that to make the sugars caramelize.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
The name of the game here is substitutions, since multiple ingredients simply aren't available outside of Chicago.
Yeah, I made it for dinner my parents and they loved it, and my mom has since asked for the recipe then made it herself.
But tomorrow I will upload some pics from the week that has now ended.
You may recall I had troubles with getting my increadibly coarse bread to rise properly, and it was suggested that I try with baking powder instead. I did.
I skipped the honey and yeast, and added four tea spoons baking powder.
The experiment was not successful.
From the first picture you can see it looks OK. But from the second, you can see that the baking powder bread (front) actually rose less than the bread with yeast (back).
The baking powder bread also had worse structural integrity and tasted worse (probably due to the no honey part).
I made French onion soup yesterday based on a recipie in my cookbook. I substituted crutons for French bread, and skipped the wine (I did not have any). I also used vegetable stock rather than beef stock (it was that or fish stock…).
Honestly, I found it too sweet. Definitely happy to have tried, though; always wanted to try FOS.
Pretty sure a restaurant I've eaten at did a soup with chicken or vegetable stock but they also added a variety of mushrooms too which adds a lot of flavor.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I couldn't find sports peppers so I used some restaurant style carrots (very spicy) instead.
mustard
relish
white onion
tomato
pickle
pickled peppers (Pepperoncini)
celery seed
Boil water, put hot dogs in, reduce heat, and wait 5 minutes.
Dice the white onion and peppers and put aside.
Slice the tomato and put aside.
Put all ingredients and hot dog on bun.
Thoughts:
* My goal was less to create something that might be called "authentic" and more to try out some ingredients I normally wouldn't put on hot dogs.
* The buns I used were not up to this task.
* Taste-wise, the pickled peppers and onion were the obvious winners. The peppers added a nice bit of heat, and the onions added crunch.
* The celery seed didn't do much; I mixed it in with the peppers just to get a more even distribution, which I think worked well, but I don't think I added enough.
* The pickle seemed redundant with the relish, and I'm not going to include it tomorrow. (Something needed to be cut for the sake of structural integrity.)
* I intend to cut up the peppers a bit finer next time. I just cut them into chunks, and probably should have diced them.
* The white onion was much too large; I'm going to have leftovers. I'm thinking shallots might be a better choice for a mild onion flavor without needing to deal with still having 3/4s of an onion left over.
* The tomato was fine, and is actually sized properly for this task. I sliced it in half, then sliced it into strips.
* This does have a good taste, with a nice variety of flavors.
If nothing else, next time I get ingredients for hot dogs, I'll probably buy some shallots as well, and cut up some pickled peppers from the fridge.
Chicken Pot Pie:
2.5c (330g) flour
1/2 tea salt
1 tea sugar
1c coconut oil
1/3c ice water (Roughly. Make more.)
Combine flour, salt, and sugar
Add coconut oil, and hand mix
Add water a bit at a time until the dough starts looking like dough.
Flatten a bit, wrap with cling wrap, and place in fridge for 30 minutes.
Cut in half, roll out each half to size and shape of pan, one a bit larger for the bottom and sides. (You can reuse the cling wrap for covering the pan.)
Place larger piece in pan, cut off any excess and use to patch any shortcomings.
Place smaller piece on a baking sheet, cover both with cling wrap, and put in the fridge.
Filling:
1 large yellow onion, chopped
bit of oil
1/2 lb precooked shredding frozen chicken
1 can corn (I drained mine; you can get away with not draining it, but watch the sodium, and check for any preservatives.)
Frozen celery (you can use whatever veggies you feel like. I used what I had.)
Frozen peas
Frozen carrots
1/3c flour
2/3c milk (Oat milk in my case. The type doesn't matter.)
Garlic powder
Thyme
Rosemary
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
Water
Preheat oven to 425 F. Also, make sure there's a lower shelf in the oven.
Chop onion and add to pan with oil.
Cook until translucent.
Add chicken and vegetables. Cook until unfrozen.
Add flour and stir in.
Add milk and stir in.
Add seasonings.
Add water a bit at a time until the thickness looks right. I aimed for thick stew.
Spoon into pan until almost full, cover with top piece. (You can reuse the cling wrap for putting on the pie when putting it into the fridge after dinner.)
Poke holes in the top. Make it look fancy if you want.
Cook for 40 minutes at 425 F. Use the bottom shelf in the oven to make sure the bottom stays crispy.
Let sit for 10 minutes.
Notes:
* This is interesting to me mostly because of the crust. I can't eat most premade pies, and sometimes I feel like eating pie. I've known that it's possible to make non-dairy pie crusts for a while now, I just couldn't be bothered to actually try that out, and this was a good push.
* The texture of the crust is a bit closer to shortbread than flaky, like many non-dairy pastries, but it's still good.
* Turns out I don't have a round pie tin. It's like I don't make pies.... I used a 6"x10" baking dish instead.
* This uses a lot of coconut oil, which is somewhat expensive. If I wanted to make this more often, I would want to find a cheaper non-dairy source of saturated fat. (I haven't bothered with this before, because I don't go through saturated fat quickly enough to matter, and coconut oil is shelf-stable. Also, it looks like I grabbed the expensive coconut oil, which didn't help the price.)
* The actual crust can be prepared, then refrigerate or freeze and do the actual pie later on.
* It's not really a weekday dish. Even if using a premade shell, there's still at least an hour from start to putting it on the table.
* I made the top crust when I needed it, just before baking. This was a mistake; I should have made both at the same time, and put the top on a baking sheet in the fridge. The top crust dried out a bit, and was difficult to roll out. (I also just left it in the bowl and covered the bowl instead of wrapping it with cling film, which didn't help.) I'm going to call the top crust "rustic".
* It is difficult to measure out the exact quantities needed; I had extra filling and bits of crust left. The filling, after cooling down, went into ice cube trays to freeze for later. The crust bits got put on a baking sheet in the oven for about 6 minutes, then eaten while waiting for the actual pot pie.
* Don't forget to poke holes in the top of the crust. I almost forgot, not that my "rustic" top crust is airtight or anything.
Final thoughts:
Except for the oops on the top crust, this came out quite well for a first try. The bottom crust stayed crisp, the filling was flavorful, and I don't see any other obvious improvements. I don't like how you'll probably have leftover crust and filling, and there's a few too many steps for me to be enthusiastic about making this again, but that's my feeling about most non-weekday food.
I used the basic Betty Crocker recipe as the basis, just a white rue with homemade veggie stock and milk. It was pretty simple, green onion, celery, shallot, carrot, potato, and chicken thighs.