The other day we bought a bag of onions that had the absolute largest onions I've ever seen! Not exaggerating, these things were literally the size of a large grapefruit! The challenge has been when a recipe calls for half an onion and I'd use one of these things, a half an onion would be about the amount of two normal onions. The recipe for Carbonnades A La Flamande (Beef and Onions Braised in Beer) seemed like the perfect use for my monster onions -- and it was!
The recipe started off with me slicing about a pound and a half of onions (around 6 cups) and, I'm proud to report, that I didn't shed even a tear. Having made the recipe now and knowing how great the onions tasted, next time I'd add a few more. They were that good. Once sliced, the onions were set aside and I moved onto preparing the meat itself.
I used a 2 1/2 pound round roast for the meat and sliced it into 1/2 inch slices. Once again, my knife skills have improved a lot since I got through the onions and meat without a drop of blood! On top of that, the slices were pretty even and uniform. Hey, I'm starting to get the hang of this cooking stuff! Then it was time to quickly brown the slices -- a little olive oil in a moderately hot pan and it just took about a minute on each side to give the slices of meat some nice color.
Then the meat was set aside and the onions went into the pan with a little more oil and generous pinches of salt and pepper. these were cooked for about 10 minutes, just enough to give to soften and brown them slightly. Remember, they're going to be baking for 90 minutes later on so they will be cooking a lot more. Right towards the end some fresh garlic was added. I need to tell you about these heads of fresh garlic that I have. It seems like I'm in the land of the giants. I picked up this garlic earlier in the week and it said "large." They weren't kidding! It is a bit hard to tell in the photo below but each of these individual cloves were literally the size of my thumb! Perfect for a garlic lover like me and I definitely didn't see any vampires flying around the kitchen. Once the cloves were peeled they were smashed and cut into a couple of large (more manageable) pieces and then stirred into the onions that had been taken off of the heat. A little more salt and pepper were added to this and I was ready to put everything together.
I made an herb bouquet with bay leaves, thyme, and several tablespoons of dried parsley. Half of the previously browned slices of meat were placed in the bottom of the casserole and then half of the onions were layered on top of them. The rest of the meat was layered on top of those onions, the herb bouquet was placed in the middle, and then everything was covered with the final layer of onions. In a saucepan I'd mixed up a cup of beef broth, two cups of apple juice (my substitute for light beer), and two tablespoons of brown sugar. The liquid was brought to a simmer and then poured over the meat and onions. I added just a bit more apple juice to bring the liquid level up to just the top of the onions but not enough to completely submerge everything.
Then it was time to start filling the house with a realllllllllly good smell. The casserole was first placed on the stove to bring it to a simmer and then placed in the bottom third of the oven and baked for about 90 minutes. Did I mention that this smelled realllllly good? I checked on it a couple of times to see if I needed to baste things but the liquid was enough that the meat remained covered.
When the baking was done, the meat was removed and the juice was strained into a saucepan. A mixture of 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar and 1 1/2 tablespoons of corn-starch were mixed up and then added to the juice in the saucepan. The juice was simmered for about four minutes or so and then it magically went from being a broth-like juice to a really neat sauce. The sauce was a bit tangy from the vinegar, almost like a mild sweet-and-sour sauce.
The onions were arranged around the meat and then the sauces was poured over the meat. Voila! Ready to serve and it even looked fairly attractive! This was another quite delicious dish and one of my favorite entree's so far. As I mentioned earlier, we loved the taste and texture of the onions and we found ourselves wishing there were more onions to eat. I suppose that's a lot better than trying to hide the vegetable under a rug or something, eh? This will be an easy meal to double for a large family gathering as well so I'm pretty sure we'll be having it again in the future! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Bon Appetit!
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