Caramelized Onions

About a month ago, I started speculating about the possibility of a savory apple pie. This weekend, I finally got around to making one. My arbitrarily determined requirements held that the predominant ingredient in the filling needed to be apple and that the pie needed to include some traditional apple-pie flavorings.

I've been thinking about pie lately. Actually, I've been thinking about baking lately (and how I should do more of it). Pies seem like one of the easiest sorts of baking to me in that they seem likely to be more amenable to improvisation.

So. Pie.

Since I'm contrary, I immediately want to subvert the pie-paradigm and make a savory pie.

"Aha," you say, thinking you have caught me in a contradiction. "Savory pies are completely ordinary. In fact, I love a good chicken pot pie."

Growing up, one of my favorite holiday dishes was my great-grandmother's noodle kugel. Kugel is one of those things that has a wide variety of meanings - it roughly translates as pudding or casserole. In my family's case, noodle kugel was a sweet baked dish composed of egg noodles loaded with cream cheese, sour cream, eggs, and pineapples. It is one of the family recipes that I got from my grandfather, though I know that the version that he gave me was changed a bit. Like me, he was a tinkerer with food.

One of my priorities in setting up my new kitchen was to make as many of my tools accessible as possible. This was a problem in my old place. Tools that were out of sight rarely got used.

Since I've set up the new kitchen, I use things like the griddle, the electric wok, and the blender almost daily. One of the first posts I ran on this blog was a list of alternative uses for an electric wok. With my renewed use of it as a tool, I've come up with a few more.