Baked Onion Rings and Potato Wedges

Here's a funny side to this blogpost - I actually found the recipe for onion rings in the South Beach Diet cookbook.  Don't go getting any funny ideas, I'm not a dieter, but for some reason this cookbook was on sale for $2 so I snatched it up.  The irony being that I find most of the recipes in the cookbook to be too unhealthy for my tastes (salt and oil) - you can tell it's American in origin by many of the ingredients.   Anyways, for a 'healthy' version of a food I love, these onion rings are great! A tiny bit on the dry side, but not enough to be annoying.

Baked Onion Rings and Potato Wedges
Onion Rings
1 Onion (brown or white)
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup breadcrumbs and/or crushed crackers.
olive oil or cooking spray

Potato Wedges
4 potatoes, washed
salt
paprika
olive oil
chili powder

Onion Rings

1. Preheat oven to ~200-210C (my cookbook says max... so hotter works too I suppose)
2. Peel onion and slice into ~0.5-1cm thick rings.
3. Separate individual rings (I set aside the small inner ones to use later)
4. Pour buttermilk into shallow bowl and put breadcrumb/cracker mixture into another shallow bowl or on a plate. I use a mix of Premium crackers (like saltines) and store bought breadcrumbs.
5. Dredge onion rings through butter milk, then coat with breadcrumb mixture.
6. Place on a cookie tray (I put down wax paper so they don't stick).  
7. Recipe says to lightly coat in cooking spray. I don't own any cooking spray so I use a bit of olive oil and just lightly brush them.
8. Bake for ~20 minutes or until golden and tender.

Potato Wedges

1. Preheat oven to 220C
2. Slice potatoes into wedges, and toss into a large bowl.
3. Toss with oil, salt and spices.  Don't use too much oil (a few glugs? I didn't measure, sorry).
4. Spread out evenly on a baking tray (or two, I used two).  Again, I laid down wax paper first to keep it from sticking.  
5. Bake for 30-50 minutes or until crispy and brown.  Check after 30 minutes, depending on thickness of slices, they are usually ready around 40 minutes.
6. Really good with ketchup and Tabasco.

Ideally, with both of these recipes, you would cook them on a silpat or similar, I don't own one of those, so I used wax paper on baking sheets.  I've recently been informed that we should use parchment paper instead of wax paper in baking, so I'll be trying that in the future. 

The recipe for potato wedges can also be applied for sweet potato fries as well. In this case, I'd add some brown sugar and cumin along with the paprika.  Sweet Hungarian paprika is best for sweet potato, while a smoked paprika is better on the potato wedges. It's not a huge difference, however, and I use whatever is handy.

If you are wary of buying buttermilk because you're thinking to yourself 'what the heck am I going to do with the rest of this?'.  Well, it can be used in breading chicken, or you can make Buttermilk Biscuits,  or there are a multitude of other recipes that call for it - why not plan ahead?

I think the next blog post will be pickled vegetables. Either that or the slow cooker chili I plan on making this weekend along with some no-knead bread.