There's a recipe that made me fall in love with almost every piece of cookware that I own. Belgian beef stew with onions and beer in my Dutch oven. In my big, heavy-bottomed traditional skillet, it's blueberry-glazed chicken breasts. And in my slow cooker, it's caramelized onions.

No, really. The slow cooker is a phenomenal piece of kitchen machinery, and I'm not just talking about for pot roast or spaghetti sauce. You slow cooker does more than you think it does, and caramelized onions is just one of the things it does. And it does them really well, and much more simply than caramelizing onions on the stove top, where they need stirring and babysitting.

Using your slow cooker virtually eliminates the chance of burning the onions. The other bonus is that you end up with this amazing onion-flavored butter at the end of cooking. You can use it in pastas, risottos, to saute vegetables. The onions themselves--well, you can use them practically anywhere: pizza, fish, meat. They're part vegetable, part condiment, and totally sweet and delicious and unforgettable.

Slow-Cooker Caramelized Onions

3 pounds Vidalia or other sweet onions (4 to 5 onions, 3 to 4 inches in diameter), peeled and cut into 1/8-inch-thick to 1/4-inch-thick slices
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

Preparation

Place the onions and butter in the insert of the slow cooker, cover, and cook on LOW for 12 to 14 hours, until the onions are deep brown and very soft. It's almost impossible to overcook these; make sure to let the onions cook until they are mahogany colored.

Notes: While this recipe calls for Vidalia onions, you can use other sweet onions such as Maui, Walla Walla, or Texas 1015s. If you have a large slow cooker, you can double the onions. It is not necessary to increase the amount of butter.

Don't blanch at the amount of butter called for here. When you drain and chill the onions, the onion-flavored butter will congeal on the surface of the cooking liquid. Skim it and use it.

May 11: Compound Butters of All Persuasion

I have been just a little boring lately, I know. I am finding being unemployed just a tiny bit more taxing than I anticipated. I know, poor me, right? But there's all these great meals to cook, though, and suddenly I have time to do it. I've been baking bread. I've been doing all of the running-around that had to be worked around somehow when I had a job; including quitting the bank that I have loathed for the past almost-three years and finding a new one, getting all of our accounts switched around. The upshot of all of this activity is that I am thoroughly exhausted by 9 PM. And no, I'm not pregnant, so as it turns out, all I am is a very old lady.

I will say this though: today, for Mother's Day, we went to Eamon's in Old Town Alexandria. And I ate two battered, deep-fried sausages for lunch. And they were just as good as you would think that two battered, deep-fried sausages would be. Better, even. And I don't even care how fattening they were. They were fricking amazing.

I meant to write more about compound butters yesterday, but Blogger ate my post. I hope it was delicious.

A compound butter is not complicated, but it's a thing of beauty. Fat, which is mostly what butter is, is a great vehicle for flavor. Fat picks up flavors easily and transfers them to other things. Also, fat tastes good. Compound butter is butter mixed with other things.

Compound butters are great on almost anything. Vegetables, steaks, fish, pasta, even popcorn. That one from yesterday, that cinnamon-honey butter? On a waffle? Oh mama. A lot of high-end groceries like Fresh Fields and Whole Foods are selling their own compound butters now, and they're excellent, but you don't have to be limited by what they have available.

All you need for a compound butter is softened, room-temperature butter (I like salted butter for compound butter, just because the salt makes the other flavors pop a little) and some other ingredients of your choice. Here are a few compound butters and some suggestions for what to do with them.
Here are a few of my favorites, and my favorite ways to eat them.

Compound Butter

1 stick salted butter (or 1 stick unsalted, and 1/8 teaspoon table salt), softened to room temperature
Other ingredients of your choice (see below)

Beat the butter with a fork until it's light and fluffy, then work in the other ingredients until incorporated. Store the butter in a small, tightly covered container in the refrigerator, or roll it tightly into a log in plastic wrap, store it in the fridge, and cut off rounds as needed.

Sour Cream & Chive Compound Butter
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons finely chopped or snipped fresh chives
Great on baked potatoes

Cheddar-Bacon-Scallion Compound Butter
1/8 cup finely shredded sharp cheddar cheese
3 tablespoons crumbled, crisp-fried bacon
2 tablespoons finely chopped scallions (white and light-green parts only)
Potatoes of any kind--especially in twice-baked potatoes

Basil-Red Pepper Compound Butter
1/8 cup chopped roasted jarred red peppers
1 tablespoon fresh chopped basil
Tossed with cheese tortellini

Garlic-Herb Compound Butter
2 cloves garlic, pressed through a garlic press
2 tablespoons fresh finely chopped herbs of your choice--try parsley, thyme, and sweet basil
Spread on toasted country bread for easy garlic bread

Chipotle Compound Butter
1 chipotle pepper in adobo
1 tablespoon adobo sauce (from chipotle can)
Spread on outside of chicken quesadillas before grilling

Cilantro-Lime Compound Butter
4 tablespoons lime juice
4 tablespoons finely-chopped cilantro
Melt over grilled fish--mahi-mahi, grouper, and red snapper would all be good

Lemon-Pepper Compound Butter
4 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon coarse-ground black pepper
Tossed with angel-hair pasta and sauteed shrimp

Gorgonzola-Worcestershire Compound Butter
1/8 cup crumbled gorgonzola or other strong bleu cheese
1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce
Melt over grilled steak

Sun-dried Tomato-Parmesan Compound Butter
3 tablespoons oil-packed, finely minced tomatoes
4 tablespoons finely grated parmesan cheese
Spread on white bread for grilled cheese sandwiches
Or, tossed with roasted broccoli

May 10: Cinnamon Honey Compound Butter

When did I become such a little old lady? One glass of wine with dinner and I'm falling asleep on the couch. What if I have to give up drinking? Oh my God!

Compound butter: if you haven't tried them yet, you're missing out. I baked bread today, something I love to do but don't do often enough. The exactitude required by baking does not suit my free spirit in the kitchen. Measuring stuff is sort of stifling to me. But I love fresh homemade bread, particularly with compound butter. All it is, is butter with stuff mixed in. Seriously--butter and stuff.

Compound butter is good for all kinds of things: popcorn, fish, pasta. I love bleu cheese butter on a freshly grilled steak; I love chicken breasts with chipotle butter; I love spaghetti with garlic-basil butter.

For the homemade bread, I made my favorite sweet compound butter. Let me just say that I think this would be amazing on pancakes, or waffles, or toast. There was a restaurant in Kalamazoo that we used to go to that served warm rolls with this butter, and it is so good, it is all I can do to not slather my three-year-old in this stuff. Believe me, based on his behaviour today, it would be an improvement.

Cinnamon Honey Butter

1 stick salted butter, room temperature
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Whip butter with a fork until fluffy. Mix in honey and cinnamon.

Keep cool. Will keep, tightly covered in refrigerator, for up to 2 weeks.

April 5: Three Salad Dressings From Scratch

At the age of 32, I have finally reached a level of maturity where I am willing to eat salad not just for the dressing but for the vegetables. There is a real joy in a big, simple bowl of chopped romaine, sliced mushrooms, radishes, onion, cucumber, chopped tomatoes, and shredded carrots, tossed together with some really great salad dressing.

Great salad dressing makes me want to lick the bowl after the salad is gone. Salad is the frame and the canvas, but salad dressing is the paint for me. It ties the whole thing together.

When it comes to salad dressing, the only thing I really can't stand is Thousand Island dressing. No, seriously: put it on a burger or a corned beef sandwich with swiss cheese and sauerkraut, but not a salad. I just can't do it.

So really it's anything but Thousand Island, but I have definite favorites. I particularly love that 800-calorie trainwreck of an iceburg lettuce wedge smothered in bleu cheese dresssing, diced tomato, crumbled bacon, and bleu cheese. Nomnomnomnomnom. By nutritional standards, it's barely a salad at all, more like a guilty pleasure.

Nora Ephron, in her semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn, describes a vinaigrette dressing that has been the backbone of my salad-dressing-making for years. I've made it with nothing but the three ingredients described in the recipe, and it's like a haiku drizzled over greens; I've added shallots and roasted garlic and black pepper and all manner of other things to it. It's practically impossible to ruin; it's never failed to make me want to guzzle it straight from the bowl of the blender.

At the other end of the spectrum from Nora Ephron's vinaigrette is a creamy garlic dressing that I am just addicted to. It's great on very strong, assertive greens, like escarole and frisee, because I love a good, big garlic flavor, especially if dinner is something garlicky. In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say.

Bleu Cheese Dressing

This dressing needs good, sturdy lettuce or it'll get soggy. This is America's Test Kitchen's recipe, sort of, but I like the bleu cheese a little fancier and a little chunkier than they suggest. Go buy yourself a wedge of really great, decadent, stinky cheese for this dressing, like an imported gorgonzola or bleu d'auvergne. Go on, you're worth it.

2 1/2 ounces bleu cheese, crumbled (about 1/2 cup)
3 tablespoons buttermilk
3 tablespoons sour cream
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
1/8 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Table salt and ground black pepper

Mix cheese and buttermilk in a small bowl until combined. Stir in remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. Can be covered and refrigerated up to 14 days.


Nora Ephron's Vinaigrette

"This makes a very strong vinaigrette that's perfect for salad greens like arugula and watercress and endive," writes Ephron in "Heartburn" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

2 tablespoons Grey Poupon mustard
2 tablespoons good red wine vinegar
6 tablespoons olive oil

Mix the mustard with the vinegar, whisking with a fork. Then, whisking constantly, slowly add the olive oil, until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy. Makes about 1/2 cup.



Creamy Garlic Dressing

This is sort of my own invention. It's strong, but it's rich and assertive and it's my favorite on bitter field greens.

2/3 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice from 1 lemon
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
6 cloves garlic, peeled and pressed through a garlic press or minced to a paste
1/8 teaspoon sugar
1/8 cup grated parmesan cheese
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a blender bowl and blend on high speed until well blended. Taste and correct seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.

March 13: Tapenade

I got my start as a food blogger writing about dip.

I wrote about how much I love dip, how, for me, things like raw veggies and chips and French bread are like little delivery trucks, bringing total goodness from a bowl in front of my face straight to my mouth: Hello, lover.

One time, a few years ago, I went to an art tour with my mother in a series of venues downtown. Some of them had great wine and snacks, some of them had Two Buck Chuck and cubes of grocery-store cheese, and one place had vegan health food snacks. Never one to pass up even questionable vegan dip, I dipped a carrot stick in the bowl of the curious greyish substance, and ate it. Filled with an immediate and pervasive sense of deep regret, I sought out some kind of awful deathberry-wheatgrass juice blend to try to wash down the mystery dip. It was the only time I can remember dip being a totally unredeemably bad, nothing good about it. I can't even fathom what on earth was in it.

On the other end of the spectrum is the year that my stepfather was in Guam with the Red Cross at Thanksgiving--he is a retired high school administrator who got tired of playing golf so he went to work doing disaster relief--and my grandmother and uncle were in North Carolina, and it was just going to be my mother and I, so we went to a friend of hers' house. The snacks before dinner that day were great, one of the reasons that I vastly prefer Thanksgiving Snacks to Thanksgiving Dinner. One of the snacks was tapenade.

Tapenade is a dark, lusty sauce that tastes like Greece, Southern France, and Italy, all mixed up together. When I tell you that it's pretty much the greatest thing ever, I'm not overselling the thing. Cut the top quarter off a pint of cherry tomatoes, hollow them out with a teaspoon, and stuff them with tapenade. Mix it into the stuffing for hard-boiled eggs. Thin it out and use it for a dip for crudites, toss it with cold pasta. Spread it on bruschetta, top it with goat cheese, and broil it briefly. Put it on grilled cheese sandwiches. Tapenade is great stuff.

The ingredient list is long and full of things that I don't generally keep on hand, like anchovies and capers and fresh thyme. Tapenade isn't something I make often, but occasionally, I'll go ahead and do it, just because it's so good. Don't worry about the anchovies--they don't make the thing taste fishy, they just round out the flavors into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Okay, the "black" olives: listen, don't go buy a can of black olives in the olive aisle at the grocery store. Go to your Fresh Fields or your Whole Foods or whatever grocery store you like. Buy great, great-tasting olives off the olive bar, those little black wrinkly ones or kalamatas or--whatever you like, basically, as long as they taste good and they don't taste like the can that they come in.

Tapenade

1/2 pound black olives, pitted, drained of their liquid
4 anchovy fillets
2 tablespoons capers, drained
1 garlic clove, peeled
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon grated orange zest
8 sprigs of thyme, leaves only
4 tablespoons olive oil

Place all the ingredients except the olive oil in the work bowl of a food processor. Pulse to blend. Add the oil and pulse a few more times to form a cohesive but still coarse paste.

March 10: Homemade Mayonnaise

There are some pieces of knowledge that are, for foodies, absolutely necessary to have, not because we use them all the time, but because when we do use them, they are so much better than whatever alternative is available that it is, quite simply, totally worth it.

The thing is, those pieces of knowledge aren't exactly static. What's necessary for me isn't necessary for, say, my best friend or my mother. I doubt that my mother has any desire to make her own fresh pasta for fettucine with garlic-cream sauce, and yet, I think that making the best fresh pasta I possibly can make is an invaluable skill. My best friend is a vegetarian, when she's not pregnant with a small person who, apparently, loves meat. I doubt that the ability to roast a chicken with moist, juicy meat and perfectly crisp and crackling skin is going to come in that handy for her, and I really do.

Homemade mayonnaise is well within the reach of anyone with a food processor, and I think that the ability to make it is a really important ability, at least for me. Why? Because it transforms and improves whatever it touches. Chicken salad is fine with Hellman's; chicken salad with homemade basil mayonnaise, chopped celery and red onion, and pine nuts on ciabatta bread is a work of art. Steamed fresh artichokes in spring are delicious, of course, but with homemade anchovy mayonnaise, they are pure luxury.

What dishes are your necessities? I have several, like I've mentioned: fresh pasta, perfectly roasted chicken, a light, fluffy, crispy waffle with cinnamon-honey butter, a brutally-rich and custardy cheesecake. And homemade mayonnaise, of course, which can be made in ten thousand different flavors for an equal number of applications. Try it, really. It's not hard, and it's worth it and it's science and art at the same time, which is something I like quite a bit about food. Here is the basic one; variations are limited only by your imaginations. And that sentence, the first one in this paragraph? Your necessities? I really want to know.

Homemade Mayonnaise

2 Egg yolks
1 Whole egg
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Pinch of salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 cups corn or vegetable oil, or best-quality olive oil

Combine the egg yolks, whole egg, mustard, salt, freshly ground pepper, and half of the lemon juice in a food processor. Process for 1 minute.

With the motor running, drizzle in the oil in a slow, steady stream. When you have added all the oil, shut the motor off and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula.

Taste the mayonnaise. Correct the seasoning. If you are using vegetable oil, you will probably need the additional lemon juice. Scrape the mayonnaise into a storage container, cover, and refrigerate until ready to use. The mayonnaise will keep safely, if refrigerated for 5 days. Stir before using.

February 26: Chile-Garlic Salsa

Sunday Nite Dinner has a recipe up for Vietnamese Chili Garlic sauce that looks amazing. It calls for a pound--a pound!--of habanero chiles, unseeded. This has got to taste like a blast furnace.

Practically every grocery store in America carries a variety of hot sauces marketed, it seems, mostly to knuckleheads in football jerseys whose aim in consuming hot sauce seems to be to try to make their other knucklehead friends cry first. It doesn't require much of a palate, or an imagination--only a high tolerance for pain. California Tortilla Company, a restaurant in our neighborhood, even has 80 or 90 bottles of hot sauce on shelves around the restaurant to sample.

Most of them don't do it for me. I love the heat, but I also want a blast of flavor, not just a shot of gasoline shaken over my food. Most are overwhelmed by the flavor of smoke or vinegar and come between me and the flavor of whatever I'm eating.

My favorite hot sauce is one that I make myself. I don't remember where it came from originally, only that it is incredibly simple and it's pure genius. It is reminiscent of that big plastic bottle of Siracha Thai-style chili-garlic sauce, but without the hit of vinegar and with a bigger bang of heat.

What to do with it? What not to do? Stir it into hot and sour soup. Mix into Asian noodle dishes. Drizzle it sparingly over grilled chicken. Give your Mexican rice impact. Toss it with short, nubbly pasta along with some chopped grilled or roasted veggies and crumbled feta or queso anjio. Stir it into a bowl of sour cream with a squeeze of lime juice and it's pure heaven on a taco or an enchilada. Add to a dull jarred salsa to revive it. Add it to stir-fried veggies. Brown ground beef for tacos in a spoonful of it.

This is made with dried chiles, which have to be soaked. To keep them submerged while soaking, I use my folding vegetable steamer in a bowl slightly larger around than the steamer. I put the chiles in the bottom, the steamer on top of them, and pour the boiling water over top to cover by an inch or so. The steamer holds everything down.

Makes about 1 cup and keeps forever in the refrigerator.

Chile-Garlic Salsa

1/2 pound (about 30) dried red chiles (I use New Mexico or pasilla chiles, depending on what looks good in the grocery store--they should be dark red and slightly pliable, not dusty and fossilized. Other possibilities include ancho, cascabel, or mulatos)
10-15 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons table salt

Soak chiles in boiling water to cover for 20 minutes. Drain and reserve 1/2 cup soaking liquid.

In a food processor, combine chiles, garlic and salt. Process to a coarse paste. With food processor running slowly pour in the olive oil until everything comes together to a fairly smooth paste. If it is still a little thicker than you like, add the reserved soaking liquid, a tablespoon or two at a time.

Will keep indefinitely. If this is too hot for your taste, add vinegar to tame the heat.