I am afraid I have been side tracked and this post as you possibly already have noticed is not featuring the promised Ajo Blanco soup.

I have been today at one of Doris’s book exchange lunches where each of the participants contribute part of the meal. As I have had a very good crop of red onions and a similarly good one of potatoes, I offered to concoct a dish from these. The girls were asking at the end of the meal if the recipe was on the blog, which I think means that they liked it. So here it is on the blog.

1 kilo onions
1 tablespoon olive oil
30 grams butter
1.5 kilos potatoes
200 ml chicken stock
100 ml thin cream
1 small tin anchovies
100 grams grated parmesan
Freshly ground black pepper

Peel and slice the onions into rounds.

Melt the butter and olive oil on a low heat in a large shallow pan. Add the onions and stir into the fats. Cover and cook slowly for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time until the onions are soft and translucent.

Peel the potatoes and slice into thin rounds.

Heat the chicken stock and cream together slowly. Chop the anchovies quite small and add together with their oil to the stock and cream. As the liquids heat the anchovies should dissolve.

Preheat the oven to 160 centigrade.

Once the liquids are hot, assemble the dish. You will need a shallow ovenproof dish.

Put a layer of overlapping potato slices in the bottom of the dish. Strew over a third of the onions, then a few spoonfuls of the stock mix, then thinly scatter over some grated parmesan. Season with black pepper, then continue with the layers finishing with a layer of potatoes generously covered with the grated cheese.

Cover and bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

You can cook to this point the day before the dish is needed, and the resting time does add to the flavour of the dish.

If you are serving the potatoes straight away, uncover them, turn the oven heat up to 180 centigrade and put the dish back in the oven for about 15 minutes until the top is nicely browned.

If you have prepared the dish in advance then it will need longer in the oven to reheat the potatoes through. I had my dish 10 minutes in the oven covered and then another 10-15 minutes uncovered until the top was nicely browned, again at 180 centigrade.