So I do a little research on what is likely to be at the market and head down there about 9:30 Saturday morning. I end up with:
3 tangerines
2 oranges
2 baskets of strawberries
I try to hold back on fruit because I've still got a bunch of geriatric granny smith apples lazing around the kitchen.
Veggies:
1 bunch asparagus
1 small bag of mixed new potatoes
1 bunch dill
1 bunch lemon grass
1 head cauliflower
2 broccoli crowns
2 huge artichokes for $1.50 each, possibly my best coup.
Total expenditure about $25.
I'm going to get the mp3 player and go prep the produce next (listening to the Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith), but just for now, kicking around some ideas for what to do with the swag.
Asparagus: I can use this at least twice, one serving maybe to be steamed (en papillote?) with a halibut filet I have thawing in the fridge; this will be flavored with ginger, sesame oil, rice wine, spring onions, for a vaguely oriental effect. Brown basmati rice will accompany this for my dinner tonight.
I'd like to use a funky recipe of Alton Brown's for some of the cauliflower and all the broccoli, which will leave me with half a head of cauliflower to bake or make soup of.
Not sure I'd've let myself be tempted by the potatoes, but with the dill being available, I felt I had to. We'll see what I find. The lemon grass makes me want to make some kind of Thai chicken soup; will have to go get one of my staples, frozen boneless chicken thighs, for that. I've got coconut milk and straw mushrooms in the pantry, and kaffir lime leaves vacuum packed in the freezer. Maybe some salmon, if it's not already in the freezer, to go with some of the dill, as well. Artichokes...hmm, big questions is will I take the time to do a hollandaise or just pick up some low fat mayo at TJ's?
Just thoughts for now, time to go prep, then do some paying work. I'll post back when the plan comes together.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Wednesday: Baby steps
So there I sat Wednesday morning, a work-at-home day, with an eggplant way past its sell-by date and a butternut squash of equal vintage. On my lunch hour the day before I had gone down to Safeway for some basics: low-fat milk, fat-free half-and-half for my coffee, and a cross-rib and a bottom roast, a pair of Cornish game hens, a tray of pork chops, and 3 half-breasts of chicken. I popped all but the cross-rib roast and 2 chops and 1 breast half into the freezer and roasted the beef in the oven. That accounted for dinner Tuesday night and, I afraid to say, breakfast Wednesday, when I took off at noon to pick up a ream of paper and stopped by a nearby Asian market for red Thai curry powder; I picked up a bunch of cilantro and some green onions while I was at it.
That evening, I sautéed the ancient eggplant in a blend of Indian spices and butter, then simmered it until it was soft and delicious. (Note to self: need some new cardamom pods, and where the heck are the cilantro seeds you bought last year?) A little chopped cilantro went on top. At the same time I made some lentils flavored with cumin according to a recipe I found on Chowhound. The lentils would be good for about 3-4 meals, the eggplant for two. The entrée was to be a half breast of chicken prepared according to the Cook's Illustrated methodology; however, when using a probe thermometer to ensure the proper doneness of meat, it's important to actually hook the cord up to the unit. I had some crispy chicken skin and my cat had some shredded, dried out meat.
None of this was rocket science, but it did ensure I had something to take to work for lunch on Thursday and Friday. I'm not saying there were all good dietary choices, but just getting it done is the goal for now. Friday morning I had a pita with scrambled eggs for breakfast and pan-fried the two pork chops in between showering and dressing, so I could take one, with leftover lentils, to work. This would have been great, but I had eaten it all by 10:30, so ended up going down to the Juice Joint for eggplant parmesan and a peanut butter cooking at 3 p.m. This was not in the plan.
On the plus side, I never did want any supper, just had my nightcap of two glasses of low-fat milk.
Renewing the food blog
This blog, with a different name, was originally set up to teach my friend David, who retired to Mexico a couple of years ago, to cook. I could have started a new blog, of course, but I like some of the things I had written, as well as the layout and photo, so I decided to keep them.
This is about a new venture, though, another culinary project, on a path I've been down before: using my love of cooking to help me lose weight and improve my health. My last successful attempt at this was via Atkins/South Beach and involved a lot of exercise. Now I'm older, and issues such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and possibly arthritis have reared their ugly heads, and so I think perhaps an approach that doesn't include huge hunks of fatty meat might be more suitable at this time in my life. (Oh, yeah, there's that exercise thing, too. And the ongoing challenge of defeating alcoholism and depression.)
I'm using three tools: a book by Oprah's Dr. Oz, You on a Diet, a 3-month online subscription to Weight Watchers, and Living Cookbook, software that lets you organize your recipes, meal plans, nutritional info, etc.
The idea is to watch your intake, of course, but this is not your mother's Weight Watchers, and you get credit for eating whole, filling, fiber-loaded foods rather than treating all calories as equal.
As for the ethnic part, I realize a lot of people are blogging about food now. One woman has embarked on the ambitious project of cooking a meal from every country in the world. An admirable endeavor, and you can bet your buppie I will be stealing recipes from her, but her reasons and methodology are different from mine. She is doing research and coming up with a complete, dinner-party-worthy menu for each country, and then she posts background info, music, I'd not be surprised if she makes costumes, too (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).
I'd like to give dinner parties, too, but what I am aiming at is something different: spend two weeks to a month exploring one country's or ethnic/religious/geographic group's cuisine and develop everyday meals that I can incorporate into my daily diet. I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up having some kind of dal pancake for breakfast when this is all done.
To this I want to add the locavore aspect; that is, create menus appropriate to the season. I live in California, where fresh produce of every kind is available not 30 miles from my farmers' market, so why not exploit that?
I think that my first country will be Egypt, and I've two books on order through Link+, due to be delivered to my local library in Alameda County tomorrow, with any luck at all.
In the meantime, I will try to post about things I have been cooking, focusing simply on mindfulness, making things from scratch, and figuring out how to get the stuff done so I'm not required to fall back on fast-food from around my office building or impulse-dial to the pizza man. When my kitchen is sufficiently tidy, I will start posting photos, too!
Just one more note: a lot of food bloggers take the approach: choose a recipe, go shopping for the ingredients, and a couple hours later, voila! A meal fit for Ruth Reichl. But again, I'm more interested in working out a system that works for me. Three days a week I get home at 6 p.m., which conventional wisdom suggests it pretty close to the latest you should be having supper. I have received a lot of inspiration from another two books, Monday to Friday Cooking by Michelle Urvater, and The Pleasures of Cooking for One, by Judith Jones (the editor who pushed for Knopf to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking). I'll review these in more detail in another post, but the short version is that they both give you good ideas about planning your meals a week at a time instead of dinner by dinner.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Not exactly dieting
This is a bit off topic, but it leads to where I personally hope to be going with my new-found rediscovery of my love of cooking:
Roving Feast columnist becomes diet outlaw
Overweight and out of shape, I need to change some things about my life, and the author's focus on not-so-much of many different and delicious foods is one path I hope to be going down.
Stick around for the next installment, where I return to the task of helping David learn to have more fun feeding himself and borrow liberally from Peg Bracken's Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book, specifically the chapter called "Alone, Cooking if: Eating with your Shoes Off"
Roving Feast columnist becomes diet outlaw
Overweight and out of shape, I need to change some things about my life, and the author's focus on not-so-much of many different and delicious foods is one path I hope to be going down.
Stick around for the next installment, where I return to the task of helping David learn to have more fun feeding himself and borrow liberally from Peg Bracken's Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book, specifically the chapter called "Alone, Cooking if: Eating with your Shoes Off"
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Chipotle Pork Stew
Okay, David, here is the next project: Chipotle Pork Stew. I had you get all of the ingredients the week I was there--all except for the pork. (Well, the tomatillos, if you haven't already used them for something else, may be getting a little bit long in the tooth.)
This is the stuff that needs to be cut or chopped:
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 (4 ounce) can green chilies, diced or 2 anaheim chilies, roasted peeled and diced
1 (7 ounce) can tomatillos, drained and roughly chopped or 7 tomatillos, chopped
1 tablespoon minced chipotle chile in adobo (this is in a can; refrigerate or freeze the residue in one of those little plastic containers)
And these spices need to be mixed together. If you still don't have a mortar & pestle, then you might try the bottom edge of a coffee cup for grinding the cumin; to chop the oregano, strip it off the stems and rock your knife up and down on the leaves (see this movie):
1/2 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon oregano leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
Even though you cut the pork off the bones, go ahead and leave the bones in when you are cooking the meat; it will add flavor and gelatin to the stock (take them out before you freeze any of this, though: the sharp bones will poke right through the plastic).
When I made this, I used the crock pot, as it's really ideally suited for that.
As the recipe suggests, you can serve this over rice, but I see it as ideal taco filling, as well. :-) If you don't want to stand over your crappy pot making sure it's not burning on the bottom, you could also transfer it, after it comes to a simmer, to that big pyrex pan you have and finish it in the oven, probably at about 325 degrees.
Update:I made this at my mom's house during Christmas week 2009, only I doubled it and used chicken thighs instead of pork. When it was done we took off the skin and removed the bones, then refrigerated to it was easy to skim the fat off the top. I also made this when I had a long-term houseguest in the fall, and with some additional broth, black beans, tomatoes and so on, it made a really terrific soup. This one is a keeper for sure.
This is the stuff that needs to be cut or chopped:
1 small onion, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 (4 ounce) can green chilies, diced or 2 anaheim chilies, roasted peeled and diced
1 (7 ounce) can tomatillos, drained and roughly chopped or 7 tomatillos, chopped
1 tablespoon minced chipotle chile in adobo (this is in a can; refrigerate or freeze the residue in one of those little plastic containers)
And these spices need to be mixed together. If you still don't have a mortar & pestle, then you might try the bottom edge of a coffee cup for grinding the cumin; to chop the oregano, strip it off the stems and rock your knife up and down on the leaves (see this movie):
1/2 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon oregano leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
Even though you cut the pork off the bones, go ahead and leave the bones in when you are cooking the meat; it will add flavor and gelatin to the stock (take them out before you freeze any of this, though: the sharp bones will poke right through the plastic).
When I made this, I used the crock pot, as it's really ideally suited for that.
As the recipe suggests, you can serve this over rice, but I see it as ideal taco filling, as well. :-) If you don't want to stand over your crappy pot making sure it's not burning on the bottom, you could also transfer it, after it comes to a simmer, to that big pyrex pan you have and finish it in the oven, probably at about 325 degrees.
Update:I made this at my mom's house during Christmas week 2009, only I doubled it and used chicken thighs instead of pork. When it was done we took off the skin and removed the bones, then refrigerated to it was easy to skim the fat off the top. I also made this when I had a long-term houseguest in the fall, and with some additional broth, black beans, tomatoes and so on, it made a really terrific soup. This one is a keeper for sure.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Using a meal to make other meals (or, new pancakes from old batter*)
*The above title is a bit of an homage to my old boss at IIASA, Kirit Parikh, Ph.D., who used to say that about our methods of recycling bits of scientific papers to put into other scientific papers. Don't tell me you've never thought about it!
When I was in Ajijic most recently, I bought two chickens at the local tienguis and cooked one that day and another the day of David's dinner party. We invited only Elliott for the "sneak preview," which was beer can chicken made in the oven rather than on the grill (David didn't have the heart to evict the spiders and lizards inhabiting his outdoor grill since he moved in in July). I'm happy to share the recipe with anyone who asks, but I got it from www.cooksillustrated.com, which you need to subscribe to (plus there are variations all over the Internet; it's a simple dish), and in any event I tweaked it beyond recognition because of not being able to find ingredients, or not being willing to pay $8 for a small jar of celery seed, or other shopping difficulties occasioned by the fact that in Spanish the words for Cayenne pepper, allspice, and pepper are apparently more or less the same. :-(
It came out well, though, as did the rosemary garlic roasted chicken and potatoes I made (after brining) Saturday night.
However, Elliott raised a point on one of these nights that was a good one: she said she would never roast a chicken because she knows that on Tuesday night [fill in name of chicken guy here] has a 2-for-one special that will taste as good as anything she could make and it won't cost her appreciably more than making them from scratch.
Which brings me to the whole question: why cook? and especially: why cook for yourself, without an audience?
As fate would have it, I happened to run across a relevant passage this morning when re-reading my favorite clay pot cookbook (don't get me started, that will be a whole nother post, as they say):
[author Grover Sales rants about all the bad food he'd had to eat, first in his home town of Louisville, then at college, then in the military]...
There are reasons to cook for yourself, though, and they are as individual as people themselves. One good reason is you've got a hankering for something you can't just run around the corner and buy, whether it's corned beef and cabbage or a BLT. Another reason for me is that often I don't feel a restaurant does as good a job as I would do myself with a particular dish. I happened to grow up in the Arizona-Sonora desert with a certain kind of guacamole accepted as the standard, and if you try to serve me one with no discernable tomatoes, for instance, I'm not going to be happy. (By the same token, I'll often order grilled halibut or sea bass at a restaurant, rather than, say, steak, because it's hard to grill fish properly at home without drying it out.) Or what if somebody brings you 5-10 pounds of freshly caught salmon or trout or something? You can't just let it moulder away in the fridge. There is also--and I'm trying to entice David with this argument as well as with the frugality aspect--a sense of almost artistic accomplishment in having taken a bunch of unrelated raw ingredients and, with a little magic, turned them into a scrumptuous dish. We are shorthanding it for now as "the zen of chopping."
Anyhow, regardless of whether you roasted it yourself or bought it two-for-one at Tony's Grill, that chicken is good for a lot more than one meal. Sure, the night you get it, you cut yourself off a nice quarter (for me it would be the wing and breast bit) and serve it to yourself with a little pile of fluffy jasmine rice (the fluffiness of which you've ensured by tying a kitchen towel over its lid like a little white turban), or a potato you've roasted along with it, and the veg of your choice. A very respectable meal for a bachelor, after all.
Once you've got the remains snugly encased in their plastic wrap in the fridge, though, they can still be eaten more or less as is--nothing wrong with cold chicken for lunch or even dinner--or, they become the slices or bite-sized pieces of chicken that form the prime ingredient of many other recipes, such as:
a sandwich;
an open-faced toasted sandwich (with cheese, maybe even a slice of ham);
(suitably jazzed up) a taco or burrito or enchilada or quesadilla;
a chicken pot pie (using the faux Bisquick mix we didn't get around to making);
a creamy or pesto-y pasta dish (either stove-top or baked with a crumb-cheese-type crust);
a salad (maybe even made with some of that left-over rice, or see magical oriental salad posted earlier)
See, I think when people aren't used to doing much cooking for themselves, the idea of a whole chicken or roast or loin of pork intimidates them. But truly, from both an economical and a time-expenditure point of view, a big cut of meat can be a lot more useful than single boneless, skinless breast or chop. It's one or two meals that are really fit for a king, and then it's a stockpile of--not leftovers--but ingredients for further meals. I mean, you pay Louis Rich and Oscar Mayer a lot of money for those tiny packets of carefully sliced and overly salted and processed sandwich meats. Why not just use the good stuff? Don't want to eat pork or chicken all week? That's why god gave you a freezer, honey chile! And that's why she invented ziploc bags.
When you really get into cooking, you will also pop the chicken bones into another ziploc bag so you can use them to make soup. But we're not aiming for the moon here yet.
When I was in Ajijic most recently, I bought two chickens at the local tienguis and cooked one that day and another the day of David's dinner party. We invited only Elliott for the "sneak preview," which was beer can chicken made in the oven rather than on the grill (David didn't have the heart to evict the spiders and lizards inhabiting his outdoor grill since he moved in in July). I'm happy to share the recipe with anyone who asks, but I got it from www.cooksillustrated.com, which you need to subscribe to (plus there are variations all over the Internet; it's a simple dish), and in any event I tweaked it beyond recognition because of not being able to find ingredients, or not being willing to pay $8 for a small jar of celery seed, or other shopping difficulties occasioned by the fact that in Spanish the words for Cayenne pepper, allspice, and pepper are apparently more or less the same. :-(
It came out well, though, as did the rosemary garlic roasted chicken and potatoes I made (after brining) Saturday night.
However, Elliott raised a point on one of these nights that was a good one: she said she would never roast a chicken because she knows that on Tuesday night [fill in name of chicken guy here] has a 2-for-one special that will taste as good as anything she could make and it won't cost her appreciably more than making them from scratch.
Which brings me to the whole question: why cook? and especially: why cook for yourself, without an audience?
As fate would have it, I happened to run across a relevant passage this morning when re-reading my favorite clay pot cookbook (don't get me started, that will be a whole nother post, as they say):
[author Grover Sales rants about all the bad food he'd had to eat, first in his home town of Louisville, then at college, then in the military]...
So dining out stayed a dream deferred until I moved to San Francisco in the late Forties, when the City still boasted of countless nontourist down-home eateries--Chinese, German, French, Greek, and mainly Italian family-style, with groaning seven-course spreads including a carafe of gusty Grignolino and dark, pungent espresso with a twist of lemon peel--all for little more than the price of a first-run movie, in those days about $1.25. With this kind of dining out, who needed to cook?
There are reasons to cook for yourself, though, and they are as individual as people themselves. One good reason is you've got a hankering for something you can't just run around the corner and buy, whether it's corned beef and cabbage or a BLT. Another reason for me is that often I don't feel a restaurant does as good a job as I would do myself with a particular dish. I happened to grow up in the Arizona-Sonora desert with a certain kind of guacamole accepted as the standard, and if you try to serve me one with no discernable tomatoes, for instance, I'm not going to be happy. (By the same token, I'll often order grilled halibut or sea bass at a restaurant, rather than, say, steak, because it's hard to grill fish properly at home without drying it out.) Or what if somebody brings you 5-10 pounds of freshly caught salmon or trout or something? You can't just let it moulder away in the fridge. There is also--and I'm trying to entice David with this argument as well as with the frugality aspect--a sense of almost artistic accomplishment in having taken a bunch of unrelated raw ingredients and, with a little magic, turned them into a scrumptuous dish. We are shorthanding it for now as "the zen of chopping."
Anyhow, regardless of whether you roasted it yourself or bought it two-for-one at Tony's Grill, that chicken is good for a lot more than one meal. Sure, the night you get it, you cut yourself off a nice quarter (for me it would be the wing and breast bit) and serve it to yourself with a little pile of fluffy jasmine rice (the fluffiness of which you've ensured by tying a kitchen towel over its lid like a little white turban), or a potato you've roasted along with it, and the veg of your choice. A very respectable meal for a bachelor, after all.
Once you've got the remains snugly encased in their plastic wrap in the fridge, though, they can still be eaten more or less as is--nothing wrong with cold chicken for lunch or even dinner--or, they become the slices or bite-sized pieces of chicken that form the prime ingredient of many other recipes, such as:
a sandwich;
an open-faced toasted sandwich (with cheese, maybe even a slice of ham);
(suitably jazzed up) a taco or burrito or enchilada or quesadilla;
a chicken pot pie (using the faux Bisquick mix we didn't get around to making);
a creamy or pesto-y pasta dish (either stove-top or baked with a crumb-cheese-type crust);
a salad (maybe even made with some of that left-over rice, or see magical oriental salad posted earlier)
See, I think when people aren't used to doing much cooking for themselves, the idea of a whole chicken or roast or loin of pork intimidates them. But truly, from both an economical and a time-expenditure point of view, a big cut of meat can be a lot more useful than single boneless, skinless breast or chop. It's one or two meals that are really fit for a king, and then it's a stockpile of--not leftovers--but ingredients for further meals. I mean, you pay Louis Rich and Oscar Mayer a lot of money for those tiny packets of carefully sliced and overly salted and processed sandwich meats. Why not just use the good stuff? Don't want to eat pork or chicken all week? That's why god gave you a freezer, honey chile! And that's why she invented ziploc bags.
When you really get into cooking, you will also pop the chicken bones into another ziploc bag so you can use them to make soup. But we're not aiming for the moon here yet.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Vinegar and onions
So, David, you thought I had let you off the hook just because you made your first blog post. (Well, technically, your second.) Not so fast, buddy!
The thought occurred to me more than once as I was wandering around Superlake (store run by canny Mexican where you can buy goods beloved of American ex-pats) and contemplating passing on to you my favorite chicken salad recipe that I would need to distinguish between the way I cook and the way you do or may be about to, if that turns out to be different.
"Should I get David some rice wine vinegar so he has it for the Top Ramen chicken salad," I mused, "or is that overkill"? It would be a simpler question if he had any kind of vinegar, say, apple cider or white, or anything but Balsamic. Tragically, in case you hadn't heard, that stuff we've been buying at Safeway and even Trader Joe's isn't real Balsamic vinegar at all, but that's another show, as Alton Brown would say.
I personally have the following vinegars at all times in my pantry, and when I run out I go get some more: "Balsamic," red wine, rice wine, raspberry (which I use almost exclusively on cooked spinach--raw spinach doesn't have enough nutritional value to put in your eye, apparently, so you can stop feeling guilty about not liking it). No tarragon, because it doesn't come up and anyway I hope to be growing my own tarragon next year, and no apple cider because, well, because I'm not sure what I would use it for. I also have a gallon jug of white vinegar, but that's for household chores relating to cat accidents, etc.
The main reason to have vinegar, unless you are into esoteric things like Sauerbraten, is for salads. So I guess it's a matter of judgment and personal taste whether you want to subtly distinguish between an Italian and an oriental salad. Will using "Balsamic" vinegar ruin the Top Ramen chicken salad? I can't tell you, but it might bug me just because I know.
Now, on to onions. I would ideally always have at least one yellow and one purple onion kicking around the kitchen. This is another thing, besides tomatoes, that doesn't go in the fridge. Cool and dry storage, kind of like potatoes, is what you need here. Conventional wisdom is that you use the yellow onion for cooking: either "sweating" it to form part of a mirepoix or soffritto, or cooking it until it starts to carmelize and turn brown, depending on the function and flavor you want in the dish. By contrast, the red onion is associated with cold service--e.g. a salad, the garnish for a raw seafood item, etc. A gorgeous combo for any raw fish or scallop would consist of lemon or lime juice, capers (chopped if they are big), and finely chopped purple onion. Come to think of it, I would make a sauce out of these to put on a thin chicken breast or fish filet I had just pan-friend or steamed.
What my father told me: Apparently when food stands set up at places like the state or county fair, the first thing the cooks do, even if they are selling corn dogs or cotton candy, is to throw some chopped onions on the griddle. The smell of the frying onions makes everyone hungry!
The thought occurred to me more than once as I was wandering around Superlake (store run by canny Mexican where you can buy goods beloved of American ex-pats) and contemplating passing on to you my favorite chicken salad recipe that I would need to distinguish between the way I cook and the way you do or may be about to, if that turns out to be different.
"Should I get David some rice wine vinegar so he has it for the Top Ramen chicken salad," I mused, "or is that overkill"? It would be a simpler question if he had any kind of vinegar, say, apple cider or white, or anything but Balsamic. Tragically, in case you hadn't heard, that stuff we've been buying at Safeway and even Trader Joe's isn't real Balsamic vinegar at all, but that's another show, as Alton Brown would say.
I personally have the following vinegars at all times in my pantry, and when I run out I go get some more: "Balsamic," red wine, rice wine, raspberry (which I use almost exclusively on cooked spinach--raw spinach doesn't have enough nutritional value to put in your eye, apparently, so you can stop feeling guilty about not liking it). No tarragon, because it doesn't come up and anyway I hope to be growing my own tarragon next year, and no apple cider because, well, because I'm not sure what I would use it for. I also have a gallon jug of white vinegar, but that's for household chores relating to cat accidents, etc.
The main reason to have vinegar, unless you are into esoteric things like Sauerbraten, is for salads. So I guess it's a matter of judgment and personal taste whether you want to subtly distinguish between an Italian and an oriental salad. Will using "Balsamic" vinegar ruin the Top Ramen chicken salad? I can't tell you, but it might bug me just because I know.
Now, on to onions. I would ideally always have at least one yellow and one purple onion kicking around the kitchen. This is another thing, besides tomatoes, that doesn't go in the fridge. Cool and dry storage, kind of like potatoes, is what you need here. Conventional wisdom is that you use the yellow onion for cooking: either "sweating" it to form part of a mirepoix or soffritto, or cooking it until it starts to carmelize and turn brown, depending on the function and flavor you want in the dish. By contrast, the red onion is associated with cold service--e.g. a salad, the garnish for a raw seafood item, etc. A gorgeous combo for any raw fish or scallop would consist of lemon or lime juice, capers (chopped if they are big), and finely chopped purple onion. Come to think of it, I would make a sauce out of these to put on a thin chicken breast or fish filet I had just pan-friend or steamed.
What my father told me: Apparently when food stands set up at places like the state or county fair, the first thing the cooks do, even if they are selling corn dogs or cotton candy, is to throw some chopped onions on the griddle. The smell of the frying onions makes everyone hungry!
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