Soupe à l'Oignon

When discussing our holidays back around Thanksgiving, Ann requested that I make her French onion soup, known as soupe à l'oignon in France, for Christmas Eve. I had already had this soup in mind, but not necessarily for Christmas Eve, because we have a 50-pound sack of onions in the pantry to use before they go bad. I don't think that she realized that to make a great batch of this soup is a fair amount of work.

It's a favorite soup of mine that never fails to remind me of all the times that my mother and I made it. When I was a boy, she would put me to work peeling and chopping the onions after which I would take turns keeping an eye on the caramelizing onions, helping to keep them from sticking and burning to the bottom of the pan.

Soupe à l'Oignon with Gratinéed Crouton

Although I have made onion soup in a single day, I decided to spread it into a three-day process, if for no other reason that to have the refrigerator to aid in removing the fat from the soup.

Day 1: Ready to Roast Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Roasted Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Beef Cheek Meat Ready to Braise

French onion soup wants to be made with a great braising cut of beef. My favorites for braising are, in order: cheek meat, shin meat, and chuck. The cheeks are the most wonderful cut on the animal and we used to serve a lot at the restaurant. Customers would never order them by the name "cheeks" so I adopted a bit of subterfuge in calling them nuggets. We would braise them until tender, refrigerate them to solidify them, then roll them in panko.

At service, we would fry them until the panko was golden and top them with a sauce made from the braising liquid. They appeared on the menu as "crispy beef nuggets" and would sell out pretty instantly. So good were they that regulars, having tasted them once, would not make the mistake of passing them up the next time that they appeared on the menu.

I was thrilled to be able to find cheek meat in my grocery for my Christmas Eve onion soup.

Day 1: Deglazing Browned Beef Cheeks with Pinot Noir

On Day 1, I roasted about five pounds of beef soup bones (split knuckles) and at the same time, braised four pounds of beef cheek meat in Pinot Noir. I transferred the soup bones (less the rendered fat) and the braised cheek meat to a big soup pot and covered everything in water. The soup pot went into the fridge overnight. The water let all the fat rise above the bones and meat so that the following day, I could remove the solidified fat before starting in on the stock.

Day 2 saw me add some thyme branches to the defatted stock and put the stockpot on the stove to cook down for several hours. I removed and discarded the soup bones and thyme, then pulled out the cheek meat. After the cheek meat cooled, I shredded it and pulled out and discarded any remaining fat. The shredded meat went back into the stock and the stock pot went back in the refrigerator, once again for the liquid fat to solidify on top.

Day 3: Fifteen Pounds of Onions to Peel

Day 3: Sliced Onions Ready to Caramelize

Day 3: Caramelized Onions with a Little Flour

Day 3 saw me defat the stock once again and then start in on the onions. You can see that fifteen pounds of onions mounded up and over the top of my pot, then cooked down to about a quarter of a pot full. The caramelization process took several hours. I inverted a skillet over the pot at first to help steam the onions. Quickly, the pot filled about two thirds full of water.

At this point, I uncovered the pot and let it cook on fairly high heat to evaporate the water, stirring every few minutes. Gradually, the onions went from white to cream to yellow to lightly brown to golden brown. The more caramelized the onions became, the more often I had to stir.

Once the onions became fully caramelized and very dry, I stirred in three heaping spoonsful of flour and let that cook for a couple of minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with a quarter bottle of Champagne before adding the onions to the pot of hot beef stock.

The soup cooked for an additional ninety minutes before I seasoned and served it.

Christmas Eve: 2010 Pinot Noir to Celebrate

Onion soup is naturally sweet from all the concentrated sugars in the onions. All this sugar wants a fairly acidic wine to help cut through the richness. Champagne is a great pairing, but then, we live in a world-class Pinot Noir region, so it was Pinot Noir for us. This 10-year old wine has mellowed enough to work with the mellow long-cooked flavors of the soup, while still having a lot of acid to scour our tongues and make each spoon of soup a pleasure.

While there is nothing difficult about making onion soup, it is somewhat labor intensive. But for a special occasion for a special girl, it was totally worth the effort.

Challah

A few weeks before Christmas, Ann asked me to make a savory bread pudding for Christmas Day brunch and some time after that, to make the bread pudding out of challah, the braided egg bread of Jewish origin. I haven't made challah in forever and ironically enough, it was the very first bread that I ever learned to make. I baked bread regularly in college and the majority of loaves were challah.

Yeah, I know that I'm weird. While other college students were eating instant ramen, I was baking bread. I had an offer to work in a bakery in San Francisco after college, but I had my eyes set on the high tech world, even in those days before the Internet.

The Finished Challah

After college, as I went from one high-tech startup to the next, I took a few years off from baking, until we had young children, when I would bake all our bread and make pizza dough weekly in the years leading up to the restaurant. My bread efforts during this period were focused on pains rustiques and bâtards, French style country breads, with minimal yeast and ultra-long ferments.

During the restaurant years, the customer demand for bread required buying bread from a commercial bakery; we were just too small a restaurant to bake the immense quantity of bread that we needed. But we still made in house all the small lot and specialty breads that we needed, including pita, focaccia, and so forth.

One great thing that the restaurant did for me was change my entire approach to baking. And it all started with eggs. Our eggs, at first chicken eggs and in the last five years duck eggs, came from small local farmers. The first eggs of the season, the pullet eggs, would be tiny. The Rhode Island red chicken eggs from later in the season would be very large, putting commercially graded jumbo eggs to shame. The Silver Appleyard duck eggs were ginormous (and coincidentally spoiled me for any other kind of eggs). Our pastry program took a dramatic leap forward when we switched exclusively to duck eggs.

Challah Dough After First Rise

Because we never had any "regular" or even predictably sized eggs, recipes that specified "4 eggs" or "12 egg yolks" were useless. This and the vast quantities of products that we needed to prepare drove us to more commercial recipes in which all ingredients are specified by weight, typically in grams. Consequently, as we developed and wrote standard recipes, they were all expressed in grams.

Although alien to most home cooks, it is a great and almost foolproof way to document a recipe. And so, I learned to bake by weight. Even today, over three years since I retired from the restaurant business, we have a commercial digital scale on our counter.

It was on this scale that I measured all my challah ingredients. I dusted off an old recipe from the restaurant and scaled it to a single loaf from a recipe giving ingredients for 8- and 16-loaf batches. Onto the scale I put the empty mixer bowl and zeroed the weight. Then one by one, I added the requisite weight of ingredients: all-purpose flour, eggs, water, agave nectar, canola oil, salt, and yeast.

Ropes Ready to Braid

Challah dough is a really sexy dough. The oil and eggs make the dough very silky and pliable and fun to work with. It's also made with all-purpose flour instead of a harder (higher protein) flour and so it doesn't develop super stretchy glutens, making it very easy to work with and giving the resulting baked loaf a very smooth and even crumb.

I am really picky about the flour that I use in baking. Having baked a lot in my life, I want a flour that is going to be rock solid consistent from batch to batch so that it behaves the same way each time that I use it. At the restaurant, we had various tried and true flours, one for each specific task. At home where I have no need for 50-pound sacks of commercial flour, I depend on King Arthur flours just like I have for all my adult life. I might buy cans of generic private-labeled store brand black beans, but I insist on King Arthur flours. I trust them to perform.

Braided Loaf Ready to Rise

Challah comes in many braids (and in other forms too). For example, I've done four-rope and six-rope braids. And while they look fantastic, they all taste the same! And so for this loaf, I did the standard three-rope braid that everyone knows how to do. Do looks really count when you're going to cube the bread for bread pudding?

Egg-Washed Loaf Ready to Bake

After braiding, the loaf gets a second rise and then a brushing with egg wash before baking in a moderate oven. I find that when baking challah that it tends to brown easily because of the egg wash and the sugar in the bread caramelizing. In fact, if you try to make a low sugar version, the challah comes out very weakly colored.

Because it browns easily, I bake it on a double sheet tray (you can see in the photo above that I have stacked two sheet trays) to help insulate the bottom. Also, the loaf tends to brown before it cooks all the way through. I keep an eye on it and when it is good and brown, I give it a tap to see if it sounds cooked (kind of hollow) all the way through. Invariably, it wants another 10-15 minutes beyond browning, so I tent it with aluminum foil for the final few minutes n the oven.

Temaki: Spicy Tuna Hand Rolls

As I have lamented elsewhere, there is no place we trust in our town for sushi and so I have been doing my own raw fish dishes to scratch that particular itch. The spicy salmon tartare that we had recently got our sushi urges raging and Ann was really longing for hand rolls, so I made some spicy tuna temaki for us.

Ann Models a Spicy Tuna Hand Roll

Check out Ann's new Christmas nail job! We ended up eating the hand rolls standing at the counter. I would roll a couple, we would eat a couple, and so forth. All great fun.

Hand Roll Mise en Place

For the tuna, I minced some seedless cucumber and sliced some green onions and then made a spicy sauce of equal parts sriracha and soy sauce with a little sesame oil for flavor. I combined these two with the minced tuna and toasted sesame seeds.

Earlier in the afternoon, I had cooked a bit of good sushi rice. Fortunately, we grow excellent sushi rice in California and it is readily available in grocery stores. Although I love imported brands from Japan, my tried and true California brand is Nishiki, but my store doesn't carry it. What I have found is that most sushi rice brands can be very good, but what is really messed up are the cooking instructions.

Most brands call for too much water, resulting in an overcooked mushy mess, especially after you add the seasoned rice vinegar to the rice. In general, I have found that 1 portion of rice to a scant 1 and an eighth portion of water is a very good ratio, depending on how fresh the rice is. For reference, a cup of uncooked sushi rice will make a good dozen temaki.

As for seasoned vinegar, I don't mess with it. I use plain rice vinegar into which I stir a little sugar or agave nectar for sweetness. I use about an eighth cup per cup of rice and sprinkle it over the hot rice, gently turning the rice while it cools to room temperature.

Lay Rice on One End of the Nori

Making temaki, hand rolls, is child's play. It's fun to let everyone, kids included, roll their own. Mistakes are still edible! Start by slicing a sheet of nori down the center longways. Place it shiny side down on your board and with moistened fingers, spread a little rice on one end.

Lay the Filling on the Rice

Lay the filling or fillings on the rice on the diagonal. Start rolling by grasping the lower corner, the lower left corner in this case, and bringing it across the filling until the lower corner meets the top edge. I like to roll left to right. They roll right to left equally easily.

Roll the Resulting Cone Over Itself

Continue to roll the resulting cone over itself until you have but a small flap remaining. Put a few grains of rice on the flap to act as glue, then press the flap down onto the body of the cone.

Spicy Tuna Hand Rolls

Annie Demonstrating Temaki-Eating Skills

Christmas 2020

Despite COVID, our subdued 2020 Christmas was one hell of a lot better than our 2019 non-Christmas. We spent all of December 2019 apart, with Ann in Virginia taking care of her critically ill mother (who would ultimately pass in August 2020) and me working and holding down the fort in Oregon.

It was a horrible time in our lives, from the stress of caring for an ailing parent, to our first time of more than a night apart, to not feeling like celebrating Christmas. I admit to being terribly depressed, just sitting in a chair for hours on end, not feeling like even eating dinner. Just as COVID was being noticed in China, Ann spent day after endless day in a hopelessly depressing nursing home. Truly, we hope to forget Christmas 2019 and Christmas 2020 went a long way towards helping us do just that.

By contrast, 2020 almost felt like a normal Christmas with us putting up a tree, giving each other presents, Christmas carols playing, decorating the house, and planning and cooking special meals for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Our Noble Fir Tree

A New Ornament Celebrating Carter's New Career

Wine Cork Tree Garland from Donald

Cookie Elf Making Chocolate Peppermint Bark

Ann's Ricotta Christmas Cookies

Christmas Gift Boxes for Neighbors

Ann Decorated the Bar

Candles on the Table

Throw Pillow Fetish Much?

Ann's Favorite Candle Holder

Christmas Eve saw cold, but decent weather, freezing fog instead of worse weather, and that made the sights along our walk beautiful. Several freezing fog photos below.

By contrast, the new camellia that I bought this summer with the understanding that it was white-petalled and spring-blooming turned out to be neither, bringing a splash of color to the back yard.

Christmas Camellia

We aren't the only ones to plan Christmas meals. But what to serve for just two people? Ann asked me to make French onion soup for Christmas Eve and a savory bread pudding that we could have with a glass of sparkling wine for brunch on Christmas. I was really happy to oblige her.

French Onion Soup for Christmas Eve

Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to Accompany the Soup

Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese Bread Pudding for Christmas Brunch

Prosecco to Pair with Bread Pudding

Ann and Chuck

Grace's Turn

In Front of the Tree

In Front of the House

Spicy Salmon Tartare

Ann and I are sushi fiends. I'm quite certain that we could eat sushi daily for months on end without getting tired of it. For us to get any decent sushi, we have to drive 45 minutes to an hour into Portland and environs, and besides being a long drive, it's a no-go during COVID anyway. Besides, there is little joy in take-out sushi. We enjoy sitting at the sushi bar and chatting with the sushi chef.

The temporary solution for us is to prepare our own raw fish. Fortunately, we can get amazing quality fish nearby and we do so every couple of weeks whenever we are near the seafood market. It's expensive, but nothing when compared to the tab from a foray to a sushi bar! Recently, I had a craving for spicy salmon, so we picked up a nice piece of king salmon and brought it home so I could make spicy salmon tartare.

Spicy Salmon Tartare

I like to use a contrasting color vegetable or fruit in my tartare for aesthetics as well as to stretch the very expensive fish, something such as avocado, cucumber, or in this case, small bias-cut asparagus sweated for a minute in a hot skillet. To the diced salmon and avocado, I added a bit of a spicy sauce that I concocted from equal parts soy sauce and sriracha with a little bit of sesame oil. The remainder of the sauce is on the plate as a garnish.

I think I speak for Ann when I say that I am afraid that our dinner of spicy salmon only whetted our appetite for sushi. It did next to nothing to satisfy the craving, only making the yearning worse.

Mediterranean-Inspired Mussels

Ann and I bought a couple pounds of delicious Washington State wild-caught mussels on a recent trip to the seafood market.

Mediterranean-Inspired Mussels

I had in mind to reprise a version of mussels that we did sporadically at the restaurant. We had mussels on the menu every day, but the preparation would change every other day or so, including new preparations and old stand-bys such as this one. Annie, I'm sorry that we're not eating bread now with which to sop up the juices.

Mediterranean-Inspired Mussels

At the restaurant, this dish would have also contained little bits of hard Spanish chorizo, but we're not eating that much meat at home, otherwise, this dish is almost identical. It depends on the spicy Calabrian chile, which has a salty and smoky flavor that other chiles cannot match.

The following quantities are sufficient for two pounds of mussels, which makes two hearty bowls or up to six appetizer portions.

1 tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves garlic, slivered
1 teaspoon Calabrian chile paste
4 piquillo peppers, sliced
zest of one orange, in long strips
1 pinch saffron
1/4 cup dry white wine

Warm the olive oil over high flame in a pan large enough to steam the mussels and add the garlic slivers. Cook until they start smelling good.

Add the chile paste, piquillos, orange zest, and saffron. Stir for a few seconds.

Add the white wine and then the mussels.

Cover and steam the mussels until they open, 90 seconds for this size, up to four minutes for the really large blues we used to get at the restaurant from Cape Cod.

Kale Salad with Pomegranate, Asian Pear, and Guanciale

It's not often that I manage to make something that Ann won't eat. But this Christmasy kale salad is beyond her limits. I ended up eating two huge kale salads for consecutive meals.

Kale Salad with Pomegranate, Asian Pear, and Guanciale

She had a brief flirtation with wanting to eat more leafy greens and asked me to make a kale salad with bacon. She has never liked kale in the past and so her request surprised me, but ever eager to please her, I made this salad of kale, pomegranate seeds, cucumber, Asian pear, guanciale (smoked hog jowl, the only bacon-like substance that we have in the house) with a balsamic vinaigrette.

In my experience, the only way to make raw kale edible in a salad is to literally drench it in a high-fat dressing and this dressing was anything but high in fat. By so drenching it, you lose any benefits of eating the kale. I enjoyed it to a certain extent, especially all the bits at the bottom of the salad bowl, but eating raw kale to me has something in common with rubbing salt in your wounds: you'll survive it, but it isn't a pleasant experience.

No more kale salads for us.

Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Annie is great at giving me ideas for dinner and something she said sparked me to poach some eggs and smother them in a low-fat chana makhani. I have a hard time eating a traditional makhani sauce, tomatoes with onions, spices, and lots of cream. Granted that it is one of the classic Indian sauces, but the cream gives my stomach fits. So I decided to try to fake the sauce with a bit of low-fat yogurt instead of cream and the results, while not the same as a classic makhani, were delicious.

Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Chickpeas, chana dal (or the black ones, kala chana), are one of my favorite legumes. I especially love popping the fresh ones right out of their pods and snacking them, but in any form, they are wonderful.

To start this dish, I sautéed some finely minced onion with whole cumin seeds until the onions started to brown a bit on the edges and the cumin seeds started to pop, then added a bit of ginger, a good bit of garlic, and a quick garam masala that I threw in my spice mill. Next in, a rough purée of  tomatoes and some chickpeas. I added a half a cup of low-fat yogurt along with water to cover the chickpeas and let the dish simmer for 90 minutes.

The resulting dish as you see above was delicious, the egg yolks blending into the sauce and adding some of the unctuousness that the heavy cream would have added. Still, the sauce was missing the silky texture and harmonious flavors that cream brings to the party. The low-fat yogurt with all its binders will never fully integrate with the sauce and leaves little speckles of white in the sauce.

All in all, it was a good compromise for a waist-friendly dish that is light on dairy and fat.