A perspicuous mind: musing about food

I am always fascinated by pickled onions, but never made it myself, until this past weekend. I found the recipe from David Lebovits blog, and started to work through the pain stacking recipe, which required  simmering 1/3 of red onion batches for 20 seconds, one batch at a time, for three times !!! But the results were worth it !

The color from red onion were preserved, even enhanced by the process if I may say, and even after 24 hours inside my fridge, I was still able to taste the crunchiness of the sliced onions. Go check on his blog for the recipe !

What's more appropriate than grilled fresh sardines to accompany pickled onions. I love sardines, even the canned ones, drown in tomato based sauce. I remembered my mother will reheat one for breakfast when she ran out of options, ate them with rice or in between toasted bread. I almost forget how good it tastes, a slice of toast with chunk of canned sardines and sliced of shallot on top.

There's no specific recipe for grilled sardines. After being cleaned, put sprigs of fresh thyme inside the cavity, squeezed some lemon juice on top, then add few splashes of olive oil and a dash of kosher salt. Then cook inside preheated grill for 10 minutes. Serve immediately with pickled onions, sliced bread and butter and any kind of drinks to complete.

Something I found out, cooked sardines were not as photogenic as the fresh ones :)

Lately, new recipes I tried at home were simple ones. In between work, chores, swimming and running, I found instant gratification in spending less time cooking and more time enjoying the meals, especially the healthy ones. Tuna tartar, steak tartar, no-fuss salads, or grilled meat and fishes are the staple at the house nowadays. We hardly have any baked goods laying around the house, most of our snacks are fresh fruits and nuts. And so far, my husband lost 3 belt notches around his waist and I lost 3% of body fat !  

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