Caramelized onions

I enjoy cooking, specially the freestyle kind - look at what's available and cook something up from those. When I get a craving, I'd look up the recipe, compare it to the tons available online and follow them loosely. One that I recently tried was milkfish in oil cooked spanish sardines style. It was yum, a bit overcooked because I wanted the bones to be really soft and edible - but still yum. It was a simple process of putting everything together in a pressure cooker, salting it slightly, and waiting for 45 minutes (which I extended to 1 hour 15) on medium heat.

From that dish, I really enjoyed the shallots. They were soft and caramelized, they were just heavenly - something that would go well with so many other dishes. So yesterday, after painting the new members from my Emirati clay collectible line, I peeled about 5AED worth of shallots and pressure cooked them with carrots, dill pickles, chili pepper, bay leaf and peppercorn (forgot the garlic!). 

It was soft, sweet and heavenly. Now, the whole bunch is waiting in the fridge to be served with fried or roasted dishes.

This reminded of a popular Philippine snack - fried peanuts with garlic. The garlic is usually sliced thinly and comes out really tasty and crunchy. People would usually squabble over who gets the few garlic slices, so my father, who also loves to cook, solved this particular problem by cooking garlic with peanuts - it was a whole wok of sliced garlic with barely any peanuts!

Yesterday's version of spanish sardines, is everything else except the sardines. Works great, now my hubby, who is not very fond of fish but is very fond of caramelized onions, can enjoy this too. 

Aren't the colors so pretty?