Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Caramelized Dinner

One of the keys to inexpensive eating is squeezing out every last drop of flavor from your ingredients. It’s pretty easy to take a mundane item and either roast it or grill it to develop the most flavor imaginable.

That’s what I did with a couple of onions I had that were getting a little advanced in age. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them, but by cooking them, it gave me a few more days of useful life before I had to decide. It takes about 30 minutes to caramelize the suckers, but it’s well worth the time. (You need to slice the onions very thin – this increases the surface area of the food: more surface area means more space to caramelize. More caramelization means more flavor. Get it?) The nice thing is that you don’t really have to babysit them while they’re cooking. I did it on a Sunday afternoon, and threw them into the fridge until I figured out what to do with them.

Skip to Tuesday. It’s a TV night - the final season of Lost is on (if you aren’t a fan, then you wouldn’t understand), and I needed finger food to eat in front of the television. I decided to turn the caramelized onions into a pizza. Not bad either (of course, it’s hard to go wrong with pizza). Paired it with some faux-fried zucchini sticks (which still need some work before I share the recipe) that we dipped into some store-bought pesto which I thinned with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.


Grab the pizza recipe in PDF form here.

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