It happens to all of us every once in awhile.
Sometimes you read the recipe wrong.
Other times, the recipe was wrong to begin with.
The oven ran cold, you thought the salt was sugar, you were in a rush, you invented something that didn’t work out. For one reason or another, you make a dish you weren’t proud of, and you have to decide what to do with it.
It honestly doesn’t happen to me too often, but then again, I don’t venture out of my comfort zone terribly often either. The handful of times I’ve truly made a mess in the kitchen over the past few years, I usually dump what I made and go on with life, serving something quick and simple instead or just ordering in sushi or pizza.
Unfortunately, this tactic does not work terribly well when your job is to cook dinner every night for 20 people.
I was lucky enough to be able to rely on things I knew well the majority of the time this summer. The chocolate mousse was a little thicker than I would have liked the second time around, and I over-salted a batch of pasta carbonara, but in general, I was doing fairly well… until a recipe for potato gratin.
I thought I’d learned my lesson when it came to potato gratins: no matter how much I trust the recipe-writer, no matter how much I love the idea of a newfangled version of potatoes and melted cheese, something always goes wrong unless I use my tried and true recipe for gratin dauphinois. Maybe it’s because I learned that recipe, as I feel that the best recipes should be learned, at the elbow of a native who had been making it for forever and a day when I lived in the north of France.
And yet, I tried again, and I failed.
Luckily, we had enough cheese and charcuterie and tomatoes and salad to make a well-rounded meal anyway, and the imperfect gratin lay forgotten in the oven until I worked up the courage to throw out the vast amount of cheese it took to make it. And luckily, I’m still learning.
This recipe isn’t mine: it’s Anne-Marie’s. It’s similar to a quiche, with caramelized onions, cream, eggs and nutmeg. Make your own pie crust if you like, but I love these ready-to-use crusts we get here, and anyway, what you care about are the onions, which I always have lying around, therefore making this the perfect thing to throw together when one of my experiments goes awry.
Onion Tart
1 kilo yellow onions
1 red onion
1/2 stick butter
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 cup white wine (my addition)
a pinch of fresh ground nutmeg
6 eggs
25 cl. crème fraîche
2 refrigerated pâtes brisées
salt and pepper
1 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. French mustard
freshly grated nutmeg
Thinly slice all of the onions.
Heat the butter and oil over low heat and add the butter, oil, onions, sugar and a pinch of salt. Cook slowly for an hour, stirring occasionally. When the onions start to caramelize, begin adding the wine, a few tablespoons at a time. As the wine evaporates, add more until all of the wine has been added. Add the mustard, thyme and nutmeg as well as salt and pepper to taste.
Combine the eggs, crème fraîche and nutmeg in a bowl.
Roll out the pâtes brisées and place them in two tarte pans. Divide the onions equally between them, and pour the egg and crème fraîche mixture over the top. Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, until the top of the tarte is set and browned. Serve lukewarm with a green salad.