Simply (Sometimes) the Best

Given my undoubted obsession with variety, and ensuring our nutrition is tickety boo, main course dishes here accordingly tend to include quite a few different veg etc. Sometimes it's good to focus on one thing, however, to give it due respect and a chance to shine.


Last night's main course, with The Dear Leader still struggling with her jaw (a corn cob injury, weirdly) and needing softish foods I went with something from the classic repertoire - a fancy version of French onion soup (think the posh French name is Panade). It is my kind of cooking anyway, in several ways - onions are, like me, cheap. It requires slow cooking and a lot of therapeutic peeling and slicing (without tears for once), and watching carefully until it achieves that perfect mahogany shade of brown. And this version entailed opening a bottle of wine that forms part of the cooking liquid, (along with beef stock), so we had to finish off the rest. Thickened with flour (darling, nobody does that these days), then enriched with loads of grated Gruyere and a good slug of Cognac (best thing for it, I'm a (married) single malt man), it was the ideal thing for a gloomy autumn evening.


That approach, focusing on one big element, is suited to soups, though I'm a fan of the French hotel using-up-bits-of-leftover-veg option too. Recently we had an enjoyable Jerusalem artichoke soup, though that had the backing of carrots and onions, with the fine flavour of those tubers given free rein; and on Saturday a pumpkin was very much to the fore in another potage (not so fine, but TDL like it). Having mistakenly overdone the carrot purchasing we're likely to have Potage de Crecy this week too. I need to go to my favourite Asian supermarket to buy another net of their excellent and incredibly cheap garlic, to go for a Spanish sopa de ajo, using three or four heads of the stuff. All this veg may be good for us (and especially our blood apparently, as far as the garlic and onions are concerned), but it is just as well we have the heavy winter duvet on the bed. Enough said.