I made onion pie!

My friend Markette is hosting an Iron Chef party tonight, the theme ingredient is onions. I have always considered onions to be more of a flavoring than a theme, so I pondered long and hard what kind of dish I could make. Then I pondered longer and harder whether I really wanted to attend a party where everything was made of onions, and where therefore there would almost certainly be no dessert. Or makeouts, come to think of it. And if there did happen to be dessert or makeouts, they certainly wouldn't be ones I'd be eager to partake in. I like most of my desserts and makeouts to be onion-free.

I decided to make some kind of onion tart, because I am pretty good at pie crust and therefore I'm halfway there without having to learn anything about onions. Also, I know it's a real thing because I entered "onion pie" into the food network search engine and like 17 onion tart recipes came up. Win! I'm pretty confident in the quality of my pie crust, and regarding the filling, I think anyone who doesn't like onions won't be at this party. Then while chatting with Markette I discovered that our entries will be judged on presentation as well as taste, and that there will be prizes.

I think the appearance of food should not be so gross that you are discouraged from tasting it, but beyond that, I've never put much thought into the presentation of my food. When I make pie, I usually put it in a pie pan and make a fluted crust, like this:

Some of the recipes I found featured a lazier approach, which involved just kinda folding the crust all over itself, tossing it on a cookie sheet (no pie pan necessary) and calling it "rustic". On reflection, I think any food that was most likely invented by people who were very near starvation and were absolutely out of all other edible possibilities - such as anything featuring as the main ingredient onions, potatoes, or grass - is most appropriately presented rustically. As a bonus, this presentation covers up more of the filling of the pie, so the starving people can imagine that maybe, just maybe there is something that once belonged to a mammal under the edges of the crust, and they are not about to dig into a pie full of a vegetable that contains zero vitamins and 12 calories.

Appropriate or not, I'm not sure the rustic tart look is going to win me any Iron Chef creative presentation awards. It might be overall a safer choice than onion gelato, which one of the real Iron Chefs would be bound to try - because they think they can shove anything through their super-fast nitrogen-fueled freezer machine and force it to be ice cream. Blech.

So here's what I came up with:

Which is the rustic look, except with an onion on top.
And some confetti, to class it up.
And a bow, because I still had more dough.


*I do not have a problem with and actually quite enjoy dishes of all kinds involving onions. And potatoes. I think grass smells nice and is pleasant to walk on barefoot, but I have never tried to bake it into a pie so I will reserve judgment. Also Markette is awesome and neither she nor her parties ever really need to be pondered.