Cooking from the Heart

That's FROM the heart, not WITH the heart. For the record - organ meat - EW!. Well except for liverwurst. I love that shit. Boudin too. I just never, ever, ever want to see it being made. But that's got nothing to do with todays recipe. it seems hubs and I have been so busy with work lately that we barely get to see each other. It's just work, eat, sleep, repeat. Tuesday was no different but we were both home early (relatively speaking) so we had time to actually sit down at the table and eat a meal together. And what a meal it was. We had hanger steaks over mashed cauliflower with balsamic roasted cippolini onions and portobello mushrooms and roasted broccoli with parmesan. So today I'll give you the rundown for the onions and mushrooms. I have always wanted to try roasting cippolini onions (i.e. tiny vidalias) so when I decided to burn my whole foods gift card and saw them in the store, I had to get them. The worst part of making these is peeling them. You need to blanch them for a couple minutes to loosen up the skins just like you do with pearl onions. It's tedious, I won't lie. But they make such a nice presentation and are so sweet and yummy that I think it is worth it on occasion. Next I rinsed and sliced 5-6 medium sized portobello mushrooms. Now let me mention that my onions were exceptionally small so I roasted them in the same pan at the same time as the mushrooms. Larger onions may need a head start.Once the mushrooms and onions were prepped I tossed them with salt and olive oil with a good splash of balsamic vinegar. I roasted them at 425 for about 20 minutes. When the onions were softened I pulled them out of the oven and noticed that all the vinegar seem to have disappeared! It was so strange since I was expecting a syrup-like reduction. Apparently, most of the vinegar was absorbed by the mushrooms (making them exceptionally delicious, I might add)! So I gave it another quick splash and let the residual heat in the pan cook it down. That's it. It was a great topper to a nicely cooked steak!