#10 - Onion Jam & My Sanity

Making onion jam was one of the very first things I did when I moved into our new apartment last October. (Moved to Ridgewood, started making my own jam, because I am incredibly unique.) Buoyed by the ability to get decent produce and my very specific craving for a burger from the Tabor Tavern in Portland (the food is one of the only things I miss about the west coast), making a savory jam seemed like an excellent way to spend an hour or two.

Had I ever made jam before? No! But honestly, cooking is one of the only things I’m forever okay with taking a whack at (no perfectionist complex here! pay no attention to the woman usually sobbing behind the curtain!) so after a quick toodle around google I was armed with red wine vinegar, vegetable oil, a sack of white onions, and far too much sugar.

The recipe I first found was, uh, bad. It had a whole weird process for heating the oil & sugar together first before dumping the onions in, which is completely inadvisable. Thankfully, I am terrible at reading recipes so I just used their measurements. Which included half a cup of sugar! There’s literally no reason for that! Also, since I’m bitching about it, the onion size was way too small. Don’t dice your onions for an onion jam, just slice it (ms. julienne if ya nasty).

But there was something in the rhythm, the process, the need for patience, and the aroma that filled the room when I did it. Plus, it was kind of a weird condiment and we didn’t know its shelf-life, so it inspired a whole slew of meals. (It’s great on any & all sandwiches, avocado toast, burgers/anything you grill, upgrades a simple pasta instantly, works as a soup topping, and it’s perfect to throw in risottos. The ultimate form, however, is on a cracker with goat cheese.) (Shout out to goat cheese, I fucking love goat cheese.)

I started making it weekly and have mastered the method for caramelizing them, which I will now share:

Stop fucking stirring them so much.

Here’s the whole process: on medium heat with just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan, start throwing your onions in. Don’t touch them for five minutes at a time for about the first 45 minutes. Stir, get the frond off the bottom, let them sit and brown again. Then for the next 30-45 minutes, stir every three-ish minutes. The final touches are a good two glugs of Worcestershire sauce (ooo baby spelled that right on my first try, v proud, had to brag), a healthy dash of brown sugar, and some red wine vinegar. But really—once you have the onions to their final stage, you can do whatever you want to the jam itself.

There’s a beautiful moment when they finally lose all their water and the color starts to really change. Onion jam is a glistening dark brown color. It’s like marmite levels of unappetizing and yet it makes me so happy when the color starts to rapidly shift. The jam takes a good two hours to make, I get in a good cry during the onion chopping process, my feet are firmly on the ground when I have the spatula in my hand, and at the end of it, I’ve made something delicious.

It’s my favorite process because you can’t replicate the results if you attempt to rush through it. Higher heat? Onions will burn. If you put the sugar in immediately, the texture doesn’t hold quite as well. The flavor is coming from the patience with which it is being created.

Anyway, this summer I wasn’t cooking because it gets so unbelievably hot in my apartment, and I’ve been absolutely miserable all summer. I’m grumpy, I can’t stop sweating from my hairline (and the backs of my knees have recently decided to join in the fun), and I know I’ve been neglecting my happiness. But guess what? I’ve decided to approach myself with radical empathy and stop acting as my own personal punishment patrol for not writing a substack, for dropping the ball on advancing my life, and instead, I’m picking that ball right back up and hitting send on whatever this is. I think I need to read more books. Like, about non-fiction topics. I want to learn again. (My brain could use some challenging expansion instead of just bombarding it with topical horror stories told in 240 characters or less for hours at a time!)

And hey, autumns approaching baby! Break out the jean jackets, I can’t wait to put on boots and stomp around Brooklyn again and stand over my stove without having to configure a fan that can blow on me without disrupting the range. I’m going to make so many risottos in the upcoming months, I’ll be up to my ears in arborio rice. I want to host again, bring people into our home and feed them and make memories.

Food is healing. Cooking is one of the only processes I regularly engage with that I feel entirely confident in, that connects me to more than just myself. I made onion jam last week, and it genuinely soothed a part of me that I was unaware had become so distraught. Turns out, chopping onions is my non-commodifiable self-care routine. Who could have guessed!

(Also, it makes for an excellent gift and no one is ever getting anything creative from me again, soz. You do get to keep the jar it comes in though!)