Here’s how it looks in process.

First: carmelizing onions.  I’m a real sissy about onions unless they’ve been cooking for about an hour.  This is at about 45 minutes in, just before they’ve really started collapsing.  I can’t extol the virtues of cast iron enough here.

You can get a better sense of what they should look like when they’re finished in this shot:

You can also see a blob of the caramel that’s now the bottom layer, under the tomatoes.  The part you don’t see is the dance that goes scrape out onions, deglaze pan with sherry, make caramel in other, inferior, pan, add caramel to cast iron pan, toss in requisite chopped olives, tomatoes, and — there we go — onions back in.

I had these delicious artisan puff pastry squares courtesy of jmags’s mother (apostrophe feel awkward there?  take it up with you know who).  She was up for a visit on her way to BC and took jmags here, one of my absolute favorites in Portland, and one of the earliest establishments still around on the now-a-bit-much-if-you-ask-me-but-still-better-than-The-Pearl Hawthorne Blvd.

So the squares.  I just cut them up into what S. (when she was very small) called “reptangles” and fit them loosely together, eliminating the need for slits.  You can now see how the caramel drip on the handle has been roasted into a stickier shade of burnt sienna.  It’s quite pretty this way, I think, although once flipped it’s really something to behold.

I have always been a fan of puff pastry in whatever incarnation it has appeared, but this is the first time I’ve really started using it regularly (as in not just for party appetizers, or something).  jmags has been going on about wrapping croissant dough around hot dogs for ages, so I made him a slight variation on the theme by making puff pastry pillows with Cajun sausage from Edelweiss and some cheddar for good measure.

Cutting them lengthwise before crosswise allowed me to fit things together nicely; it also allowed me to see the opalescent cubes of fat scattered throughout the pigflesh.  I fried the links before wrapping and baking them; as one piece bowed back toward its casing in the heat, the fat-square slowly yet inexorably popped out into the pan.  Wow.

Also note: don’t let the cream in the coffee fool you.  This was not my plate.  Even on the weekend, I am a pretty light eater in the morning, and I could only manage one.  But it was glorious.

Last experiment to share: strudel!

Shiitake & portobello mushrooms, goat cheese, garlic, sherry, thyme, and a little lemon just before I wrapped it up in the dough = an ideal dish to offset the cold edge that’s crept into the evenings.

Final note: I know phyllo dough is supposedly vastly superior, but I have essays to grade.  Also, I have had great success with the Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets, as well as the Pastaworks variety, but the frozen sheets from Trader Joe’s were a real disappointment.  Even cooked well past the time recommended, they were still doughy, far less fluffy, and oily rather than buttery.