Two days of homage. Yesterday, I ate my last omelette perhaps at Coffee House and day before yesterday, I ate scrambled eggs on toast. Alone and happy as I like it.  I love eating alone. At home or in restaurants. Nothing really should come between you and food. Not love, not romance, not angst.  Over-the-table conversations and dinner romances are uh-uh duh and duh.Thanks Cheryl for telling me about the no-frills scrambled.  A next-door marvel that took me eight years to discover.

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I loved this piece on cooking onions and patience by that cutie Nigel Slater. So here goes.


And not before time

There are plenty of short cuts worth taking in the kitchen (really, who wants to spend their life making croissants?), but more importantly there are the things we often skip or hurry or gloss over that it might be wiser not to. By which I mean the nuts and bolts of the cooking process that while tempting to rush through would, if we were to take a bit more time over them, make cooking and eating even more of a pleasure.

Cooking onions is a task worth taking your time over - 10 minutes just isn't long enough to get their crisp, watery flesh to break down into layers of honey-toned sweetness. Onions, whether small and whole or large and sliced, need a low temperature if they are not to burn and blacken, and plenty of stirring to prevent them colouring unevenly. The warmest of gold, evenly spread throughout, will take a good 25 minutes of an onion's time.

We like onion tarts in our house, both the thick, quivering quiche variety and those that are more like a pizza but without the cheese and tomato glop. Any onion that is to go inside a tart case needs cooking first, and cooking slowly, too. Then there are the dishes where you need the onion softened but not coloured. I'm thinking of that soup here, the one that looks creamy and tasteless, yet is, at first slurp, the very essence of gentle onion. I tend to cut a circular piece of greaseproof paper for this one, laying loosely over the top of the roughly chopped onions, so that they steam rather than brown. It works, too, if you keep a lid on and don't have the heat too high.

My favourite way to cut an onion is in to segments: so, in half from root to tip then each half into thick segments, like an orange. This way, they may take a long while to cook, but when they do finally soften you get thick nuggets of golden, melting onion flesh, somehow more satisfying than those skinny rings that get into a tangle and make your tart crumble to pieces as you slice.

It's the same with roast onions, baked onions, call them what you will. They take an age to soften right through to the core. But to try to undercut the required time is to end up with something quite unpleasant, if not inedible. You can get round this by boiling them for 20 minutes or so before draining them and returning the partially softened onions to the oven. If you toss them in a little sizzling butter first, they will cook all the quicker, but you must still have your patient hat on. Time alone will render a hard, winter onion as soft as butter and no amount of tinkering can really speed up the process.

For the record, an onion, thickly sliced or roughly chopped, with a little butter in a heavy pot, will take a good 30 minutes to soften over a low heat. I'm not sure even I give it that long, which is a shame, because the benefits are extraordinarily sweet and satisfying.


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My father loved a plain digestive, though it is difficult ot think of him and the iconic biscuit without conjuring up a picture of him trying to slip an entire unbroken one into his mouth in one go. I can't remember him ever actually succeeding, and if he did it was probably something he did in secret.
It is funny how, whether you had them in your kitchen or not, the digestive always manages to taste of home. It has a unique ability to take you to safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly,
even though you may never have even been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of the hamster's cage about it, is instantly recognisable as a good place to be. It has been said that this is one of the great tea dunking biscuits but I have to disagree. The digestive is altogether too risky. If ever a biscuit will let you down on the way from mug to mouth, it is this one, its open crumbly nature being just not strong enough to hold a decent amount of liquid before it collapses in your lap. But then,
like not using the zebra crossing, some might welcome such risks to inject a bit of danger and excitement into their day.

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