Savoury Onion Jam (and how I'm trying to get my mojo back)

As the first post in my new plan to blog at least once a week, I don't really expect it to be particularly good - I'm way out of practice in organising my thoughts into something coherent and entertaining.

I still haven't been able to figure out if I've stopped crafting and cooking because I'm feeling low, or if I'm feeling low because I've stopped crafting and cooking. This week, I'm really trying to force myself to do a bit of both, in the hopes that the act of doing will help me feel more like myself, which in turn will (hopefully) make me want to do it more. Fingers crossed, because I could really use a boost right now.

Last school term we held our inaugural school disco. I did heaps of organising, and had an amazing group of people to work with. I think it went pretty well - we've had some good feedback and the kids all seemed to have a blast.

While the kiddies were all boogying inside, some brave souls (dads, mostly) stood outside in the winter night and BBQ'd about 250 sausages, as well as frying up some onions to go with them. The onions were not as popular as we expected, so we were left with about 5 kilos of (uncut, thankfully) onions. At the end of the night, I gathered up all the perishables and brought them home. I've been staring at the huge bag of onions for about 2 weeks before I figured out what to do with them all!

[Aside - I'm not profiting from the BBQ here, but the onions won't last until our next BBQ, so I've taken ownership of them, and I'll buy a new 5kg of onions when the time comes...]

I thought about French Onion Soup, but my lot aren't big soup eaters - M says that if you can't eat it with a fork, it doesn't count as a real meal. So I went for the next best (large quantity of onion-using) thing - jam. It's a savoury jam, but still quite sweet. We've been eating it with cheese on crackers, on hamburgers, dotted over pizzas, and I'm gearing up to roast some tomatoes so we can make an onion and tomato tart - yum!

This recipe takes about 1.5 hours to make, so don't be in a hurry to go anywhere when you're making it. The onions are sweated down with rosemary, thyme and bay leaf, then slowly caramelised with vinegar, sugar and red wine until it's all thick and sticky.

savoury onion jam

This recipe made three smallish jars, and used about 10 onions. I've made a second batch since then, which was 1.5 times the recipe, and filled about 6 jars, so who knows how that works.

For those playing at home, this recipe came from here.

Would I make it again? Definitely. It's easy, though time consuming, and I'm not sure you could really screw it up - apart from maybe burning the bujesus out of it. I didn't think others would be quite as thrilled with this as I was, but I gave 2 of the jars away to friends and one lot was eaten within about 2 days - that's a pretty good compliment, I think!