Onion Ragu

First of all, can we talk about the word "Ragu".  Somehow, no matter how many amazing words I've heard associated with ragu (i.e. short rib ragu, lamb shank ragu, wild boar ragu, you see where I'm going here) I can't help but associate it with one very specific image...a can of Chef Boyardee.  Why is that?! 


Sorry, I digress.  (Wait, is it digressing if it's the first thing I started talk about?  Is that an oxymoron?  Oh crap...I'm digressing again...oh pre-digressing.  Is that a word?  Hmpf... You know what I'm trying to say!)

All that is not the point this story.  The point of this story is what happens when you let an onion...yes, the lowly onion...cook for inordinate amounts of time.  So long in fact that it goes beyond carmelizing (the point at which I typically like to mix it with some fontina, shove it into some puff pastry, and call it a tart), and actually just falls apart.



A friend of mine once told me she watched a show where some 95 year old Italian grandma did this, and she called it "killing the onions".  Ha!  I love that.  Italian grandmas really know what they're talking about.

So after about and hour, and most of a bottle of white wine (some of the wine accidentally/on purpose escaped into a glass for me) the dead onions look kinda like this...

 I left the lid on the pot for about half the time since I didn't want the onions to get too much color.  I was more concerned with texture, and I wanted to speed this process along since I wanted to eat dinner in the somewhat near future.

Shortly after I took this picture, the onions got a bit more white wine, and then they got pulsed with the hand-blender.  Yes, technically that's cheating, but I was STARVING, and I didn't have another to wait for them to fall apart on their own.  It was all worth it when the sauce was tossed with a bit of duck liver ravioli, and then topped with a balsalmic reduction.



I love how you can barely see that there's a sauce.  It's a nice little suprise when you eat it and the taste of killed onions is aaaaaaall there.