January 23, 2015--Best of Behind: Left-Over Red Onion

We've been wintering in Florida for seven years and during that time I've written about 50 Snowbirding stories. Here's an early one from February 9, 2009--

It’s finally come to this—consuming thoughts about what to do with the remaining three quarters after the dish I was preparing required just one tablespoon of minced red onion.

I was making a side dish of pineapple salsa to accompany chili con carne, thinking it would work very well, its coolness a refreshing complement to the heat of the chili’s spice base. We were motivated to think about making salsa since we already had about a third of a left over fresh pineapple and some two-day old cilantro—both perfect for the salsa. But we needed a bit of red onion, which we thus bought during our next supermarket run.

I am pleased to report that both dishes worked out well, but we were left with the challenge of coming up with a recipe that would require just the amount of the red onion I had wrapped in Saran and stashed in the vegetable bin of the frig.

Quite soon a partial solution presented itself: Rona had been eating away during lunch at a rotisserie chicken we had picked up a few days ago; but at the rate she was going at it, in a day or two we would either have to toss it or think about what to do with a half of the remaining hacked-at chicken. So after a bit of a struggle about what to do I was pleased with myself when I came up with an idea to take care of not just the soon-to-be-spoiled chicken but also at least some of the onion: chicken croquettes.

They are not a fancy or very healthy dish, but almost everyone takes an occasional guilty pleasure in eating croquettes of one sort of another. Who can resist almost anything that’s pan-fried?

So I deboned the chicken and then blasted it into a sort of mush in the Cuisinart. To that I added about half a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup (another guilt pleasure from the old days); a couple of fistfuls of homemade bread crumbs (from about a dozen breadsticks); half a finely chopped yellow pepper (more about the other half in a moment); and, most satisfying of all, two tablespoons of minced red onion.

I mixed everything together with my hands and from the result made four four-inch diameter patties, which I then, to solidified them, placed in the refrigerator for an hour before frying them up crispy brown in peanut oil. Some steamed fresh spinach and a side of sinful hash brown potatoes made perfect accompaniments. But again, I was left with some of that relentless red onion—a little less than a third of it, which I rewrapped in the saved Saran and once again deposited in the vegetable cooler.

With that piece of onion on my mind, two evenings later, Rona said, “We haven’t made fish for awhile.  There’s so much good fresh-caught fish here in Florida. Maybe we could buy some and you could make one of your baked fish dishes. I used to love those when we had our house in East Hampton.”

Thus the next afternoon we bought two filets of perfect-looking Key West Snapper at the Old Dixie Seafood shop and at the farmers market four medium-sized potatoes and a bunch of fresh parsley. I remembered a recipe from Long Island days that called for beginning by baking in olive oil a layer of peeled and very thinly sliced potatoes before, after they have crisped, toping them with the fish on which you scatter a half cup of bread crumbs (I had retained enough for this from the previous week) ,a drizzle of olive oil, and then bake for about 15 minutes. Simple and delicious.

But as in the past I did a bit of improvising. Why not, I thought, slice up some mushrooms to also place on top of the filets and with the remaining yellow pepper and two carrots I had retained from something I had made the week before why not also slice them very thin and insert them into the potato layer? And while I’m at that, wouldn’t this also be an opportunity to slice up and use the rest of that red onion, also depositing it among the potatoes and now peppers and carrots? Sort of like killing three left-over birds with one recipe.

It worked out very well.

We had been so good about eating at home, both enjoying the cooking and the resulting dishes, that we decided to take a break from that and did some eating out—one night at Taverna Kyma, a local Greek place that does wonderful grilling on an open wood fire (environmental laws are much laxer in the south than up north and this does wonders for certain kinds of cooking) and where the portions of charred Mediterranean fish and richly flavored lamb are so generous that inevitably there is a box of food to take home for the next day’s lunch; and a second night at Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza where again the unregulated coal ovens turn out about the best pizza in South Florida and again where there are always at least three left-over slices to take home to freeze and out of which another lunch can be deliciously concocted; and then on a third night we . . .

Actually, on the third night we got back to cooking at home. The remaining parsley was beginning to wilt and I was eager to do something with it. But I was stumped. There wasn’t enough to use in a faux pesto sauce and too much to sprinkle on another baked fish—though by then I did have some ideas about what to do with the swordfish that was beginning to show up at Old Dixie.

Then I remembered that they had been featuring little neck clams; and since it had been some time since I had made spaghetti with white clam sauce—spaghetti vongole—which calls for a smattering of chopped parsley, well, I was happy to realize, isn’t this the solution to my parsley problem?

And, of course, if any of the olive oil saturated pasta remained, which was certain, cold leftover spaghetti is one of Rona’s favorite warm day lunches. And with the weather here finally warming after a record-breaking cold snap . . .