Recipe Curried Pickled Red Onions

[The Late Night Gourmet]

This was a happy accident. I have pickled red onions on-hand at any given time, but I generally like to deviate from the standard onion-vinegar-sugar-salt format each time. I've been using rosemary lately, but I ran out of that, so I decided to throw in some parsley. Then, since I felt myself drawn once again to North Africa in my seasoning, I reached for the ras el hanout, but instead grabbed turmeric...and fenugreek...and cumin. I had just made a curried picked red onion.

Besides the wonderful taste profile, what surprised me most was what it did to the color. You'd expect a pickled red onion to be a magenta color as the pigment of the outer later bleeds into the rest of the onion fiber. Well, as I learned as a small child, red + yellow = orange. Pretty!

I just tried them in a breakfast burrito this morning with homemade sausage and egg whites. Very tasty! I also put balsamic vinegar in the sausage, but I think that's a bit of a stretch for this challenge.

Ingredients

1 cup white vinegar
1 cup water
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon fenugreek powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon parsley (keep together in a single bunch)
1/2 red onion, thinly sliced

Directions

1. Bring water and vinegar to a boil in a small pot. Dissolve sugar and salt into liquid, then stir in remaining ingredients except for onion.
2. Remove from heat, add sliced onion, and cover. Steep for at least 20 minutes.
3. Remove onions from liquid with tongs - retaining liquid - and place in a glass jar. Pour liquid from pot, making sure that parsley and at least some of the peppercorns and mustard seed get tin the jar.
4. Allow to cool on counter top, then refrigerate.