Pissaladière

Pronounced "pea-salad-year", it's a cousin of pizza from Nice, so quite a nostalgic food for me. 

You can get it everywhere over there (bakeries, supermarkets, street stalls...), but no hope of ever finding it here... Luckily, it's quite easy to make:)

Ingredients (for 1 big/2 small pissaladières)

For the dough:

250g self raising flour 

150ml water

a pinch of salt 

a generous drizzle of olive oil

For the topping:

7 medium sized onions 

a few anchovies 

a few black olives 

thyme 

balsamic vinegar 

Preparation 

1. Slice the onions and sauté them in olive oil with plenty of thyme. You want to first put them on high heat to brown them a bit, then add a slog of balsamic vinegar and reduce to medium low, still stirring regularly.

Traditionally, pissaladière is made with white onions, but I couldn't resist this beautiful color:

2. While the onions are gently reducing, we're going to make the dough. Mix the flour, salt, water and olive oil into an homogenous ball.

I do it with a stand mixer and dough hook, but it would work just fine by hand.

3. Flour a work surface and roll the dough into shape (I make 2 small ones because we have a small oven). In a pinch, you can use a clean wine bottle as a rolling pin.

4. Once the onions are ready, spread them on the dough (leaving a little border), and add the black olives and anchovies.

5. Bake at 200C for 15 min (up to 25 if you have a slow oven), and enjoy!!!

For example it goes very well with a side salad of mixed leaves, cherry tomatoes and yellow bell pepper...

Happy New Year :-)

2015 was a great year :-) For a lot of reasons, big and small, but there was definitely a pretty big one: we got married!!! :-)

It all went pretty fast actually: we got engaged last May, and since we wanted decent weather for our wedding, we had to decide between trying to organise it in the autumn before it got cold, or wait until the end of the spring next year.

Neither of us is very patient, and there are few things that dial the anticipation up to 11 like getting married:-)
Also, after thinking about it, we figured the more time we had to plan it, the bigger it would become and the more it would take over our life (and our savings!).
So the autumn it was.

So we kinda buried ourselves in wedding planning and dropped off the face of the Earth for a while, but it was all worth it:-) We had an amazing day, and it was great to be surrounded by family and friends!

More details some other time, but for now, here's hoping 2016 is at least as great as 2015:-) Happy New Year everyone!!!