I don’t know if I am being spurred on by the lackluster economy, the New York Times article that I read interviewing people who lived through The Depression and the measures they took to survive, or thumbing through a few pages of Julia Child’s biography that inspired me to make this. I think it was a combination of all three. The article made me think of ways to use the food items that I have on hand along with inexpensive items procured at the grocery store. Julia Child always reminds me of onion and potato soups, savory soups that are luxurious while being thrifty at the same time. Root vegetables are the way to go. It’s “shabby chic”. Use whatever kinds of onions you have around. I used onions and leeks because that’s what I had. Who doesn’t want to have a crusty piece of bread or even better, a grilled cheese, savory and sweet to dip in a rich vegetable broth brimming and infused with caramelized onions spiked with bay leaf, pepper, and thyme?
This is also a ménage a trois of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Latin America in that the onion soup is the sexy lady, the cheese and date syrup a hot guy hailing from Turkey, and the tortilla encasing the cheese and syrup the other participating Latin American female. Whoa, kinky but good, the flavor of course!
Kasseri (the kind of Turkish cheese I used) is a medium hard cheese with a soft texture and a hard rind (think provolone in hardness) made of unpasteurized sheep’s milk with sometimes goat’s milk mixed in. The use of fresh unpasteurized milk is necessary to get the correct flavor/texture and it is aged for at least four months to develop the flavor. Traditionally, this cheese is eaten (I didn’t know this) in sandwiches or in the kasseropita pie (Turkish cheese pie). —testkitchenette
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