I love pickled onions but I don’t get to eat them enough since there are only few places that serve them. So what is one to do? Make it yourself. Actually not being able to get what I want has draw me to cooking in general. Peaches, a restaurant in my neighborhood, serves red pickled onions on a beet salad and that’s where I got my idea for this weekend’s dish.
The weather has been beautiful this weekend and all I wanted to eat was some light vegetables and fruit. This amazing beet salad with freshly made pickled onions has totally hit the spot and turned out very similar to the one at Peaches.
Now to the pickled onions. I have researched many recipes most of them use red vine vinegar, which is unacceptable in my case because I can’t stand the smell of vinegary red vine. I guess it comes from bad experience with cheap red wine…? Plus all I had at home was regular white vinegar.
I decided to try the base recipe from Simply Recipes (their mango salsa is OUT of this world) and compliment with spices I like. The result? Amazing! The sweetness of onions comes through the vinegar and the strong oniony smell is gone. It’s simple and quick to make, the taste is perfect and it will last refrigerated for more then a month.
Ingredients:
2-3 medium onions
1 1/2 cup of vinegar
1/2 cup of sugar
3 bay leaves
6-7 pepper corns
Process:
1. Cut up onions and throw them in a pan with boiling water. Let it simmer for 2 minutes. Drain all the water in a colander.
2. Meanwhile combine vinegar, sugar and spices in a saucepan and bring it to boil. When it starts boiling, cover up, reduce the heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
3. Add onions into the vinegar mixture, cover and let it simmer for 1 minute. By now you should see characteristic red color to emerge.
4. Transfer into a glass jar with a cover. Let is sit open for about 2 hours to cool down and then close the top and store in a fridge. Taste gets better in next 24 hours but I couldn’t wait and had to use it in my salad couple hours later.
This is what I mixed in the salad:
Baby arugula, fresh radish, shredded beet salad since this what I had on hand, tangerines, of course my pickled red onions and light raspberry vinaigrette dressing.
***Sunday 4/15: I have started a little windowsill garden. I have planted radishes, onion and lettuce. I can’t wait how will they come out tasting, if they will come out at all. It would be so wonderful to be able to grab some lettuce leaves right from my window. I will keep you updated on my windowsill gardening.
Here is 1 of 2 pots:






























