As Gandalf says in The Two Towers, sometimes you close your eyes and stars wheel overhead, as long as a life age of the earth.
Or so it feels since once upon a time in my early 20s I decided to make a cornmeal stuffing for turkey on a Thanksgiving with really great mushrooms and blue cornmeal and was surprised to find out that it basically came out green after the chicken broth and turkey fat had cooked into it. Welcome to color theory.
Anyway, back then I told people to close their eyes and eat it and it would taste good and it did. But it was pretty hard to have a Thanksgiving plate that included something that was the color of rot.
Tonight wasn’t quite that, but Clark’s gruyere frittata includes red wine instead of white wine. I’m good with that in terms of taste. Even sometimes in terms of aesthetics—there’s a red wine risotto I make now and again that’s got a deep port-wine look to it when it’s done. This, on the other hand, just comes out gray. I sort of suspected that might happen and it did. It was fine, because it was delicious.
I also just ignored everything about the timing on the caramelization of the onions beforehand because I’ve learned over the years that most recipes are just plain wrong about how long it takes to caramelize onions right. I recall seeing a thread on Reddit some months ago where people were asking what cookbooks get wrong and caramelizing onions was the top of the list. Clark’s estimate was closer than most, though.
The soy-marinated hard-boiled eggs I’m doing tomorrow with half the surviving dozen of eggs we have—it turns out I was out of katsuobushi, which I should have around anyway as a staple.
A good dish. I felt a bit as if I did something dull in the sense that when you have a lot of eggs, a frittata seems like “of course”. But most of the “no, do this more challenging thing instead” felt like more than I wanted to do.
The cookbook, generally, is something I will want to work with more—so I’ll give it a proper workover in this column some time this fall.
Just now realized it's been a full decade since Tom Scocca's piece in Slate about caramelizing onions, and the lies recipe writers tell when describing how long it takes.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-why-recipe-writers-lie-and-lie-about-how-long-they-take-to-caramelize.html