Category: Sides and Vegetables

Here’s a great side dish to accompany grilled or roasted tri-tip – baked onions. There are a couple of ways to make this dish – one in the oven ahead of grilling the tri-tips on the Weber BBQ, alongside the tri-tips if you roast them in the oven, or ahead of time by cooking the onions in the coals of the BBQ fire.

It couldn’t be simpler – just takes a bit of planning and a bit of time – but it can overlap with cooking the tri-tips if you first start by getting the onions going.

I like to use just plain yellow onions – available everywhere. A rule of thumb might be 1 medium onion per person – but we really like onions so we usually double up the recipe and keep any left over to warm up along with the left over tri-tip later in the week.

To roast the onions in the oven, begin by pre-heating the oven to 425º F. Then, take a baking sheet or glass baking dish with aluminum foil (to ease the cleanup chores) and simply place the onions on the sheet or into the dish. Put them into the oven and wait – about an hour or so. Test to see if they’re done with a knife which should go in easily and come out cleanly. Remove them from the oven and let them cool down so that you can handle them.

To serve, use a knife to cut off the top and, optionally, drop a pat of butter into the onion – seasoning with salt and pepper.

For an alternative technique – cooking the onions in the coals of the BBQ – see this Weber video about “Melted Onions“.

Update: for the latest version of this recipe, please see my Scott’s Kitchen version.

This Christmas Eve, instead of our usual favorite Lemon Garlic Orzo side dish, we cooked a side dish of roasted small potatoes. We found a useful recipe here and modified it just a bit — and the results were wonderful!

There’s certainly nothing particularly healthy or low-fat about this recipe – but it’s so simple and results in some great small potatoes!

(Added: December 26, 2005)

Ingredients
– 3 lbs of mixed small (1 inch) potatoes (Yukon Gold, Fingerling and Red)
– 1/3 C olive oil
– Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
– Set aside 2 tablespoons butter for finishing

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cut the potatoes in half. Toss the potatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper in a large bowl.
3. Using a no-stick coated rimmed cookie sheet, place the potatoes “face down” in the pan. If you have some extras, just create a bit of a second layer with those potatoes also facing down.
4. Roast in the oven for 55 minutes.
5. Remove the cookie sheet from the over, add the butter (using two 1 TBSP chunks is fine – don’t worry about spreading the butter around). Return to the oven for five minutes.
6. Remove from the oven, toss well into a serving bowl and serve immediately. It couldn’t be simpler!