No Whey, José!

Another thing that I’ve been really into lately is caramelized onions. Slow cooking onions for about a half an hour releases their natural sugars and caramelizes them, making them sweet and even more delicious. When I told Josh that I wanted to make something with caramelized onions he went on to tell me how you really have to be patient and let them cook for 45 minutes to an hour to really achieve that dark, caramelly onions, and I could tell that he was gonna get on my case if I was impatient and said “Ok they’re done!” after 10 minutes of cooking. So I said yea yea and went about my caramelizing business. Well of course Josh was right and I learned after attempting to caramelize onions several times that the longer you wait and the longer it slowly cooks, the sweeter and more delicious they are.

My first attempt was when I made this orzo pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted asparagus, and of course caramelized onions. I had never had orzo before. I categorize orzo with couscous and other small pasta that seems super tedious to eat. But I saw someone making an orzo pasta on tv and thought I should give it a try. We ended up getting this tri-color orzo, which was kind of cool because it had all the colors of the dish I wanted to make right in it.

I started out cooking the onions in some olive oil until they started to get translucent, then I cranked the heat all the way down to low and walked away..something that was very hard for me to do. I’m a stirrer. Ask Josh, ask my Dad..I love to stir the pot. It makes me feel like I’m doing something productive. But I actually walked away, peeking over my shoulder at the pan of delicious sliced onions, and really tried to wait the 45 minutes that Josh told me about. Of course I ended up waiting like 20 minutes instead and then added the sun-dried tomatoes..I thought it might infuse the oil with its rich, sweet flavor.

I cooked them for maybe 10 more minutes after that, and as you can see in the picture the onions were far from being caramelized but they were starting to goddamnit and that’s good enough for me. The orzo pasta turned out really well..I thought the combination of the roasted asparagus, the sun-dried tomatoes and the halfway-sort of caramelized onions went really well together. It wasn’t one of those holy-shit-this-is-our-new-favorite-dinner dishes but it was still very good.

My second attempt was when I was making one of our usual dinners, ziti with Tofurky Beer Brat sausages. It’s a quick pasta dish that we make once or twice a week and it hasn’t really gotten old yet. Since I was still in my caramelized onions kick, I was trying to incorporate it in any dish possible. So I thought how awesome would caramelized onions and beer brat sausages be together? Answer: super awesome.

Each time I make this I try to cook the onions a little bit longer to test my culinary patience, and I think the last time I made it up to the 30 minute mark. Not too shabby.. The onions are delicious. You could seriously eat them plain and call it a day. Instead I put them in my favorite diced tomato and fresh basil sauce with some beer brats and called it supper. Before I started using the onions in this sauce I used to put a couple garlic cloves…and since the onions give it a sweeter flavor it totally transforms the sauce. Especially since sausage and onions already go so great together.

Here’s a shot of my plate after I started eating. After our dinner is finally done cooking we’re both super hungry, and normally we wait for each other to get our plates and sit down at our coffee table (where we eat every night), but if it’s something that I want to take pictures of I give Josh the ‘ok’ to start without me. So usually I try to take a quick shot before I go and guff up the plate but sometimes a shot of the half eaten dish is just as good, right?