...Stuffed Red Onions.

Everywhere you look these days, people are stuffing one type of food inside another type of food!  The food-inside-food (-inside-food) you've all heard about is the Turducken, but it has spread far and wide, and now there are entire websites devoted to foods inside other foods.  Being the food-obsessed American that I am, I have to stay current with the trends, and I don't think this trend will end any time soon.

This is one of those dinners you cook to show off your skills in the kitchen.  Like many fancy meals, a simpler version would taste just as good and use up a lot less of your precious time.  But hey, what kind of blog would that be...

May I present to you Stuffed Red Onions.  The recipe was adapted a smidgen from this one here at Epicurious, but probably not enough to call my own.  Nevertheless, here is how I made these brightly colored orbs of flavor.  As always, I tried to make the meal healthier than the original.

For the onions, you'll need:

-Red onion (one per person you plan to impress, this recipe makes 3-4)
-Package of lean ground beef
-1/4 cup olive oil
-Two cloves garlic (or a few shakes of freeze-dried garlic from a bottle)
-Salt and pepper
-Oregano, mint, dill, bay leaves (I didn't have mint or bay leaves, use what you have)
-Diluted white vinegar (because I didn't have white wine)
-Healthy brown rice, cooked (about 1/4 cup per onion)
-Half a lemon

Put a large pot of salted water on the stove and set it to boil.  While that's heating up, peel and trim your onions.  Get rid of that outer layer of papery skin, cut off the stem, rinse off all the junk that has been sitting on your onions since you bought them a few weeks ago.  Now that your pretty purple onions are looking their best, cook them in the boiling water for about ten minutes so they can soften up.

Remove them carefully.  They will be hot!  Wait a few minutes, then slice one side open from top to bottom, cutting through two or three layers.  You may have to work at it a little while, but try to pry the onion open enough to remove the insides without breaking the outer layers.  Set your hollowed out onions aside for now.

Because we hate to waste food, chop up the insides of the onions until you have about 1/2 cup.  Seal up the rest for later use.  In a large frying pan, heat up a few tablespoons of olive oil and toss in your chopped onions, along with your choice of garlic.  I never have fresh garlic on hand, but there's always an abundance of freeze-dried garlic or garlic powder.  It all works.  If there's one thing I've learned in my attempts to cook new food, you can pretty much sub anything you have for anything you don't have.  I mean, sure there are limits (don't go substituting salt for sugar), but I still can't tell you the difference between most herbs. 

Let it sizzle until your kitchen smells wonderful.

Cook the onion and garlic for a few minutes, add a teaspoon or so of salt, as well as any herbs you've gathered up, and then you can start to cook the meat.  Let the meat cook through.  If you read the ingredients, you've already prepared your rice, or at the very least you're in the process of microwaving your frozen 3-minute Costco brown rice.  I never use any other kind!

Add a few squeezes of your lemon and a drizzle of vinegar.  Like I said, it's all about the ingredients you have.  Google will tell you what kind of ingredients work in place of the ones you forgot to buy.  No, I didn't have white wine, and yes, my version probably ended up tasting a little different than the original, but guess what, I didn't care and neither did anyone else!  Add in your cooked rice and stir it all together.  Now is the time to taste test.  If your meat doesn't taste good now, it's not going to in the end.  Season accordingly.

Preheat the oven to 400° F and grab the onions you prepared earlier.  Now instead of hot onions, you have to be careful with the meat mix.  It goes straight from the frying pan into the onion that now sits in the palm of your hand.  Fill each onion with about 1/2 cup of the mix and place in a baking dish.

Drizzle with oil and lemon juice (and white wine if you have it).  I topped mine with some reduced fat cheese, because cheese makes everything better.

Cook the onions for about 30 minutes.  They should be browned and crispy on top.  The original recipe says to serve them hot or at room temperature.  I don't know about you, but I don't like room temperature meat.  My recommendation is to serve them hot, like normal dinner is served.

We've got a non-cheese eater among us.

Plate that onion and garnish with something leafy and green.  Because I only made three onions, there was a pretty good amount of leftover beef.  I served that on the side as well, because we can eat.

Remember how I said a simpler version would taste just as good?  Well I still stand by that, since no one was man enough to eat the actual onion shell.  But a plate of meat'n'rice scramble just can't compete with the beauty of an entire roasted red onion filled with the same stuff, topped with toasty cheese.  There really is no comparison.