This is Noonie. She’s a very standoffish snobby kitty.

Noonie would be very fond of this soup were she able to cook it. Having no opposable thumbs and an unshakeable hatred for mankind, she probably won’t. But you, on the other hand,  can make this soup. In fact, you should. It’s a bit time-consuming, so it’s not something you could whip on the quick on a weekend night before you go out. But if you wanted to impress the person you love or if you’ve having a dinner party, it would be a lovely first course.

There are some changes I made to the recipe I found online. The original calls for pureeing the soup and then straining it through a fine-mesh sieve to extract as much puree as possible. Well, I didn’t see that it needed to be that, well, thin. Instead I just used my immersion blender directly in the Dutch oven; I left it with some texture. Small bits of the many onions and garlic. It seemed nicer that way. The Parmesan crostini also didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted either, but still held up nicely when floated on top of the soup.

Six Onion Soup w/Parmesan Crostini

4 tbl. unsalted butter

2 yellow onions, chopped

3 leeks, cleaned well, white part only, sliced

4 shallots, sliced

6 green onions, white part only, sliced

6 garlic cloves, chopped

4 cups reduced-sodium chicken stock

1 cup heavy cream

salt & white pepper

1 tbl. chives, minced

1 tsp. minced garlic

4 French bread slices (small rounds)

2 tbl. grated Parmesan cheese

In a large stockpot over medium-low, melt butter. Add the onions, leeks, shallot, green onions and garlic and cook until softened, stirring occasionally. This took me about 20 minutes; I liked them a bit caramelized. Add the chicken stock and cream and cook for 10 minutes. Season with salt and white pepper. Remove the pot from the heat and place on heatproof surface. Pulse with your immersion blender until the consistency is what you like. (If you don’t have an immersion blender, use a food processor and work in batches. But be careful not to burn yourself.) Garnish with minced chives.

Preheat oven to 350. Spread minced garlic on the bread, top with the cheese and bake golden brown. Float on top of the soup.

“Potato salad?” you say. “Really?”

Yes, yes, I know it’s largely a dish destined for summer cook-outs, beachfront gatherings, and family reunions most of us determinedly avoid. Who amongst us doesn’t have memories of the nearly electric-yellow potato salad, the main ingredient mostly over- or undercooked, the sweet slather of mustard-mayo, and that abhorrent pickle relish. I mean, honestly, what is that stuff? Ergh.

But no. This is not your summertime potato salad, friends. This is not a dish to be made the night before and shoved into the fridge for the next day. This potato salad is instant gratification, baby, and after making my first version of it, I thought of ways to make it more decadent if you so wished.  Of course, most of you have already donned your virtuous faces for the New Year, so decadence may not be your bag…yet. It’s okay. This kind of potato salad can wait for you to break down your resolutions, try some of the extra goodies that will go with it, and make you its bitch. It has all the time in the world.

World’s Best Warm Potato Salad

2 lbs. quartered red potatoes

1/2 lb. trimmed green beans (fresh!!), cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces

1 tablespoon canola oil (alternately, 1 tablespoon of bacon drippings if you’re feeling wicked)

1 medium chopped onion

1/4 cup Dijon mustard (break out the good stuff, and if you don’t have any good mustard, why?)

3 tbs. white wine vinegar

1 tb. sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. white pepper

options: crumbled bacon, crumbled goat cheese

Cook potatoes in boiling water 10 minutes; add green beans and cook 3 minutes more, or until everything is tender. In a large nonstick skillet, heat oil (or bacon drippings) on medium. Add chopped onion and saute 8 minutes or until softened. Remove skillet from heat; whisk in mustard, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper. Drain potatoes and beans; place in serving bowl, pour mustard vinaigrette over all, toss. Add something extra if you like.

*drool*

The crunch of the green beans, the near-caramelized char of the onions, the tang and bite of a mustard vinaigrette, and ohhhh, the potatoes….let us not forget the potatoes. If I didn’t have to worry about squeezing into a wedding dress later this year (hopefully), I would probably just have eaten the entire damn thing. (Actually, it’s quite light. Only a 131 calories a serving.) I think we could best call this potato salad a winter potato salad. I don’t know how it is upon reheating; I’ll let you know after tonight.

Virtue, vice, it’s all the same thing anyway. If anyone tries it with the bacon option, pleaseohplease let me know if I was right.

Up here in Canada, the problem with entertaining is you kind of run out of food. Staring at an empty fridge and thinking about dinner with an empty head this evening, things looked dire.

Earlier today — anticipating this, a bit — I’d started preparing some dried black beans in the slow cooker, two hours on “high” and four on “low” being pretty much my perfect-prep formula for them.

But other than the black beans, and some rice, I was clueless.

The good news: looking in the fridge, I realized I had an avocado on the verge of super-ripeness; also, a half a lemon and half a green pepper. On the phone with Kali, I got some spice suggestions and wound up making what turned out to be an awesome casserole-type thing.

The breakdown:

3 cups cooked Basmati rice (done up in the rice cooker)
1.5 cups cooked black beans (nice and tender)
1 medium-size avocado, cut into cubes and sprinkled with lemon juice to avoid grossness
0.5 green pepper, diced

mixed it all up, and then attacked the spices, with a pinch each of:
cumin seeds
garam masala
coriander
cayenne pepper
paprika
salt

and some mixing afterwards to get the spices all blended in.

In retrospect: (a) I should have left the avocado out of this and mixed it in last, as the stirring-in of the avocado chunks made them a bit mushy, but the repeated stirring to get the spices blended throughout really reduced most of the good pieces to half-paste; (b) I should have added the spices then mixed one spice at a time; as it was I wound up sprinkling all the spices on top, THEN stirring, which resulted in some clumping and little “flavour bombs” hidden through the dish.

Mixed it all up, put it in a covered casserole dish with 0.75 cups of grated chedder-hot-pepper cheese (a specialty of the dairy near my parents’ place in Ontario), and let it sit in the oven at 250 for about an hour while I tinkered with my blog — essentially just to let the cheese melt.

And it turned out very well! Sometimes the simplest things are best — hardy fare for a cold Canadian winter, in the lull between blizzards.

Not bad for a “no-food-in-the-house” meal, either. Not counting the time it took to prep the beans and rice, about 15 minutes actual cooking/mixing time, plus the half-hour of cheese melt time in the oven — in other words, about as much time as it takes to prepare Kraft Dinner. Of the two, this is definitely the better option!