Saturday Night Vidalia Onions

This recipe brings back so many fond memories for me

When I was a young bride, years and years and years ago, we used to cook these every Saturday night

so that's why I named them Saturday Night Vidalia Onions. When I was a young woman, we only went out to eat on special occasions

In fact, standing here thinking about it, I only remember our town having three restaurants

It certainly wasn't the way it is today. and we were so poor

There was about three or four of us young couples and we really, really had to struggle

And we would save our pennies all week and then on Saturday night we'd all get together

walk in with our meat that we just treasured so that we had worked hard to buy

and we would all sit down to a glorious meal every Saturday night

and it always included one of these onions. One of the ways you can cut down on it burning your eyes

is to peel it underneath the water. An old trick that I used to use years ago

taking a wooden match and sticking it in my mouth and just chewing on the wooden stem

and the sulfur took away the odor of the onion. Now, we've got him peeled

and I'm taking just a regular apple cora and just turn him down into the center of our onion

And we're making a little nest here because we going to be sticking a beef bouillon cube down in there So this will just make it a little bit easier Now we going to take our onion and we going to quarter him And we not going all the way down to the root because

you don't want him to bust open. See, there's enough room now for us to get the butter in

between our quarters and get our beef bouillon down in there. We're going to start with just

a bouillon cube. We're going to drop him in there and then we're going to take our butter

and put in between each slice of the onion. And you won't believe how wonderful this dish is

When you bowl it up, if it had cheese on it and French bread in it

you would think that you were having French onion soup. And then what butter we couldn't get in there

we're just going to frost the top of the onion. All we do now is double wrap our onion with a heavy-duty aluminum foil

You don't want to use a lightweight because as you're turning them on your coals with the tongs

you just might bust the foil, and then you'd lose all your juice

and your juice is what really makes this onion. So we're going to seal them up as tight as we can

because we don't want to lose a drop. In case your barbecue gets rained out

these are terrific cooked in the oven. So it's ready for the grill

Now what goes good on the grill with onions is potatoes. It's really, really hard to improve a potato

All we gonna do is take our baking potato wash it prick it with a fork Because our potatoes are not as big as our onions we going to be able to take our piece of foil and double it

and we're going to secure this like we did our onion. But because there's no juice in the potato, it'll be completely safe

Now, I've always heard that when you're using tinfoil to cook on the grill with it

you should always put the shiny side in that has something to do with reflecting the heat

into the food. So that's what we've done. And these babies are ready for the heat

I've got my potatoes and onions ready to go on the grill. Now, if we were cooking with charcoal

you would want to nestle these potatoes down in the hot coals. But because we've got such a great

grill that we can really get the temperature high on today. I'm just going to lay them right here

on the grate. And you can tell the difference because your onions are round and your potatoes

are oblong. And they would both cook about the same length of time. So you would put all this on

at the same time. We're looking at about 45 minutes if they're on hot coals. And when we get through

you're not gonna believe the French onion soup flavor that you're gonna get with those onions

And in a few minutes, we'll finish them up and I'll show you. Can you hear the sizzle

Oh and they nice and soft And our onions are nice and soft too Yes this is how you tell See all the juice That the beef bouillon and the butter coming out to make that wonderful juice

And it looks just like an onion soup, doesn't it? I don't want to lose any of that juice, so I'm going to do this very carefully

And you always want to serve your onions in a bowl because of all the wonderful onion and beef stock

Look at that. It'll make you sash your mama. All right, let's take a look at our potatoes

Now, some people like to leave their potatoes in the tin foil because it'll keep them hot

But I like to take mine out, so that's what I'm gonna do. And these are so hot, I think I'm gonna have to resort

to using my extra fingers. I love potatoes. Potatoes are probably my favorite food

There's so many things that you can do with a potato. You can fry it, you can cream it, you can boil it

boil it and it's really hard to improve on a baked potato

but there's just something about a potato that's cooked on the grill

It's unbelievably divine. It gets like a cream potato in the center

All this needs is a little sour cream, a little green onions

How delicious does that look? I get so excited when I'm serving potatoes

A little salt, a little fresh ground pepper, And it just don't get no better than that