I don't eat or even think about onions all that often, but when I came across this recipe in the Williams Sonoma cookbook Easy Vegetarian, I was reminded of the time my family was in Bern, Switzerland during the annual onion festival. On the last Monday in November (1997), the ordinarily orderly streets of the Swiss capital were suddenly overrun with market stalls full of onions and onion-based treats, and teenage revelers who would throw confetti at you or bop you on the head with a squeaky toy hammer. It rained beautifully, turning the confetti underfoot into purple sludge, and my favorite memory of that day is of standing under the canvas canopy of one of the stalls with my mother and sister, sharing a greasy onion quiche, and staying warm and dry while the cold, clean Swiss rain fell all around us.
Here's a picture of some confetti from that day (along with 15-year-old cookie crumbs!) that I saved in a sweet shop bag:
I wanted to see if cooking these onion tarts might bring back some of the cosy, joyful feelings I felt during the onion festival. I could type out the recipe, but it's probably no more copyright infringy to post a photo instead, so here it is (you can click on the picture to zoom in):
Like I said, I don't eat onions a lot, so when I saw that I needed 2 cups of thinly sliced onions, I went ahead and bought a 2 lb. bag for $2. It turned out to be the equivalent of two medium-sized onions. (I got the sweet, pretty, purple Italian ones.) And, even though I'm a big fan of goat cheese, I've had difficulty getting through an 8 oz. log by myself, so I only bought the 4 oz. one, which cost $4. The puff pastry comes in a box of 2 sheets, originally priced at $5, but on sale for $3.50. I spent $2 for a little bunchlet of thyme, which I hated doing because in the summer, you can buy a whole plant for that much money and have more thyme than you'll ever need (if only!). So overall, I spent about $12 making this recipe, not counting the cost of butter.
Speaking of butter, I only used 2-1/2 tbsp to sautee the onions, garlic, and thyme, which was plenty. I figured there was already a lot of butter in the puff pastry, but it turns out it was made with vegetable oil! Now if only I could find a whole wheat puff pastry--then this recipe might almost count as healthy.
Other than using less butter and less cheese, I pretty much followed the recipe to the letter. (One thing not mentioned in the recipe (but shown in the accompanying photograph) was that they pressed the lip of a glass into the center of each pastry square so the edges could rise around the filling. You should press firmly with the glass, but not so hard that it cuts all the way through the pastry.)
Next time I'll do two things differently. Firstly, it only took an hour and a half or so for the pastry to thaw. I left it out for just over 3 hours (put it out on a plate, fed the dog, walked the dog, waited for my roommate to finish washing dishes, washed my dishes, then finally rolled out the dough), and I think that might have made it turn out a little less puffy than it could have been. Secondly, I should have added twice as much thyme to the onion mixture (I'm not sure I got the entire tablespoon in--I was just throwing it in as I went), and I would have stripped the stems ahead of time so it was ready to go. It's so fiddly to get the leaves off, and leaving the stems in is no good in my opinion. Except for the garnish, as shown below on the final product:
My roommate was hovering around as I cooked and seemed unenthusiastic about what she saw. She likes to try my cooking, but thought this looked unappetizing. I told her I was going to make some half-portions, in order to fit everything on the cookie sheet, so she agreed to try one. Here's how the pastries fit on the tray (shown after baking, with the trimmed ends of the pastry dough in little piles in the corners):
(I always bake with baking parchment. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me.)
And here's the half-portion I gave to my roommate:
We sat down in the TV room to eat, and a few seconds later, my roommate got up and went into the kitchen. Uh-oh, I thought. She's going to sneak it into the garbage can. But a moment later, she came back with a second half-portion. "Did you just get seconds?" I asked. "Yeah..." she said, defensively. "It's okay," I said. "I just didn't think you liked it." "No, it's good!" she said.
I myself ended up eating THREE of the whole portions and one of the half-portions over the course of the day (the pastries came out of the oven at 4 PM). Then I had oniony dreams all night and kept waking up to the smell of garlic on my hands (I never remember to wear gloves when I chop it).
My ruling is that, while it doesn't quite take me back to Switzerland (or 1997, for that matter), this is a very good recipe, too good for it's own good. So good, it just might be bad. In fact, I think I'll go finish off the leftovers now.
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