3.05.2007

Dining at the woodfinish abode

First, hopefully, in a series. The woodfinish abode (tm) is increasingly given to more complicated recipes than your basic frozen pizza or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (not that we should disparage those oh-so-convenient sources of deliciousness). Vanity requires that I occasionally record the latest culinary exploit.

In this instance, it was a recipe from nancy silverton's sandwich book. Imagine a Pritchard Scale of cooking, wherein we plot the difficulty of the recipe along the X axis, then the gustatory appeal along the Y axis, and measure the total area to approximate a recipe's greatness. Ms. Silverton's book would blow the lid off. Every sandwich sounds delicious, but almost every one involves 5 sub-recipes, each about the amount of effort I put in for a really good Sunday night dinner. Luckily there are a few low-X recipes that can be managed with the encouragement of a Beefeater and tonic. In particular, her grilled cheese with marinated onions and whole-grain mustard was pretty straightforward and absolutely delectable.

The first step is to marinate sliced yellow onion in a mix of olive oil, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper at room temperature for about 20 minutes. This nicely softens up the onion without cooking, while at the same time mellowing the flavor... oh, and incidentally getting it soaked through with olive oil. Buttered sourdough bread (in this case, Iggy's) is spread with whole grain French mustard and layered with thin sliced gruyere and the onions. Pressed on a Cuisinart Griddler for about 8 minutes, the result was crispy on the outside with molten cheese enveloping savory onions on the inside. It went perfectly with a Dogfish Head Burton Baton. Highly recommended.