Monday, January 26, 2009

Watching THE NINES-while making carmelized onions

Found an interesting recipe for making carmelized onions on the LA Times website this weekend. Since it was really cold (I mean really cold), I decided to make the onions. You take 5 pounds of onions and put them in a cast iron pot with about 1/2 cup of oil and some salt. You then proceed to cook them for the next 4 hours on low heat. You have to stir them every 15 minutes. Cook and stir repeatedly. Anyway, while the onions were cooking, I threw on a movie I had heard about called "The Nines". It is basically 3 stories interconnected with some mystical spiritual "god stuff" and "what is reality?" junk thrown in for good measure. I found out that the onions were taking longer than I thought, so I took the cover off of the pot, to let some of the liquid cook out of the onions. There is a lot of water in onions. The Nines, had a small cast that was in each story, and I have to say the dialog was pretty sharp in the first story. The second story had an awful lot of inside Hollywood stuff, about testing TV shows things people probably don't care about. The third story was sort of a pseudo Twilight Zone type of thing. I had started the onions in the morning but since I had kept the heat so low it was actually taking about 6 hours instead of 4 hours. I think the trick is to keep the heat moderately high and then turn the heat way down towards the end of the cooking and reducing process. I enjoyed "The Nines" although I wouldn't even pretend to understand what it meant. For all I know the film was just a big puzzle wrapped in a lot of pseudo intellectual concepts about what man's place in the universe is. Indeed man may actually be the center of his own universe, although this doesn't really pay the cable bill. The onions turned out really well, incredibly the 5 pound bag was reduced to about 16 ounces when all was said and done.

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