Excited anticipation or stuffed onions as dinner

During one of the last days of my Christmas holidays in Madrid I went to a gorgeous library which is specialized in books about fotography, graphic design, art... but they also have selected works from other fields and this is where this book fell into my clutches:

Admittedly, I never heard about Yotam Ottolenghi before but I instantly liked  his book. The recipes seemed to be different, great variety and sorted according to vegetable groups, lovely graphic design, and mix of the mayor influences from the Mediterranean.

That day I didn't buy the book, fearing it would add too much weight to my luggage so I ordered it the same night from an online book store. Not even a week back home, the delivery came and I decided to go for the dish which caught my attention at first:

Stuffed onions.

On the picture they were laying, nicely stuffed + browned, and ready to eat.

Well, bought all ingredients and set to work. Then I realized: I never asked myself how to obtain single onion layers. In a whole. 3-4 from one onion. And I can tell you, that was a very complicated process - but let's start with the ingredients (according to Yotam Ottolenghi, El gourmet vegetariano, 2012 RBA Libros S.A.):

-for 4 persons

butter to butter the casserole

500ml vegetable consommé
350ml white wine
4 big onions
3 small tomatos
120g breadcrumbs
90g crumbled feta
80g chopped parsely
3EL olive oil, + some more to refine once the onions will be served
2 garlic cloves
3 spring onions cut into julienne (small stripes)
3/4 teaspoon of salt
black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 180°. Take an ovenproof dish and butter it.

2. Pour the consommé and the white wine into a medium sized pot and bring it to the boil. In the meantime cut off 5mm of the superior and inferior part of the onions. Cut them once at the center to peel of the brown skin. [Up to this point, more than easy]. Little by little, extract the onion heart (keep them to give them another use) and conserve 2 or 3 layers. [This is where my fight started: how to get out the heart? I tried with pushing, and if I was lucky I could see a tiny bump at the other end. It worked a bit better with the help of a spoon, and I managed to squeeze of the inner part. The next 2-3 layers were scraped out. For the trickiest part I carefully separated the layers with the back of the spoon and twirstend and turned them until there was a way to get them out of the outer layer. That took my quite a while. Yotam, if you should ever come across this blog, please reveal your secret. How to do this with less effort? Any other hints from you readers are of course also welcome ;). My conclusion: might work better with less solid (young?) onions.].

Cook the layers in the boiling consommé (not all of them at one time) for 3-4minutes until they are soft. [Needless to say that I had to cut off the cooker, otherwise the consommé would have boiled silently away :o)] Drain well and let them cool down. Keep the consommé.

3. To prepare the filling, shred the tomatos with a cheese grater (the skin will remain, throw away). Put the shred tomato into a big bowl and add the breadcrumbs, the crumbled feta, the parsley, olive oil, the garlic, the spring onions, salt and some black pepper.

4. Fill the onions abundantly with the filling. Put together the ends of each onion [as you can see on my foto that was impossible in my case. At the end it wasn't a problem at all. Together with the butter and the cosommé, the onions did not stick to the dish at all] and place them with this end down in the buttered dish. Pour some 75mls of the consommé to cover the ground of the dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until the onions are soft and have browned a bit and the filling is cooked. You may add some more consommé, when the onions get try during baking.
Sprinkle with some olive oil and serve immediately.

Aren't they looking good? :) And yes, with their juicy-yummie filling, the breadcrumbs and as so often the parsely as highlight for rounding it off they were worth the effort.

I served them with lamb's lettuce and some fresh white bread - delicious.

Enjoy the rest of the sunday and be careful with easy looking onion recipes ;)

Julia