Guest Star!

My wonderful husband loves to cook as much as I do but he doesn't get to do it very often.  Typically he comes home after working all day, I throw him and the boys outside and I'm left inside alone to cook dinner.  It's my very precious "me" time.


I think this same wonderful husband has a little bit of blog envy.  Every few days he'll say, "If you don't want to blog tonight, I'll do it for you." or "If you ever want a break from cooking, I'll cook dinner.  I'll even blog about it." or "If you ever want a break from blogging, just let me know.  I'll be happy to take a turn."  Whatever his motive, I think it's cute and I've decided to give him a turn.


We harvested the onions from our Pea Patch today and we now have a ton of onions.  Our favorite thing to make with a ton of onions is French Onion Soup. Jon is the French Onion Soup maker in our house.  French Onion Soup making is a weekend adventure.  It takes a lot of time for perfection but the soup is worth every second you wait.  We only make French Onion Soup once or twice a year and I savor every bowl.  I'm not a big soup fan, but there's just something about this soup that makes my mouth water.  So we had French Onion Soup for dinner, oh and hamburgers too.  I'll blog about the hamburgers when we have them next time; we have them often, the soup, sadly, not so much.


So without further ado, here's that wonderful husband of mine!

Hello, Jon here, taking over the blog for the evening. Like Abbey, I'm not a soup fan, I like Baked Potato Soup (heart attack in a bowl), Chili, Stew and French Onion. That's it. I never really thought or knew anything about French Onion soup until I saw my patron saint of kitchens, Alton Brown, make it on Good Eats.

A quick aside about Good Eats. I love the show. It's my absolute favorite on the Food Network. The humor and style is right up my alley. What I love most though is that he teaches you about food. You don't sit there and watch Alton cook something you'll never make (for the most part). He teaches you about techniques and ingredients. He teaches you about hygiene, storage, kitchen equipment, etc. I owe my love of cooking to this show.

So, needless to say, I made Alton's recipe. I'm not going to repeat the whole thing here but I'll go into our modifications. First, this is a dish to make if you like to cook and don't mind spending some time in the kitchen. You'll spend a lot of time on this dish with your knives. If you cook, you owe it to yourself to get a good chef's knife. Several years ago, I took one of those omnipresent Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons and picked up basically this set. Take care of a good quality knife and it will last you forever. That means no dishwasher!

Anyway, back to the onions, 4-5lbs of Frenching onions. For those not in the know, Frenching is a style of cutting. If you're not sure how to dissect an onion, click the recipe link above and watch the video. I find a certain zen in it and really love Frenching onions. When done, you'll be rewarded with something like this:

At this point your kitchen will start to smell delicious. Honestly, is there much out there that smells better than onions and butter? Now the waiting starts, About an hour later you start working on the soup portion of things when five pounds of onions has cooked down to two cups.

Now its time for the liquid. Here is where we start to deviate from Alton's recipe. His soup came out too sweet for our liking. So we simply omit the apple cider and double the chicken stock. The wine and caramelized onions still leave plenty of sweetness but we feel the final product is more balanced to our liking. Here you see the soup approaching completion, complete with bouquet garni (tied up mess of herbs).

Now, if there is a reason for French Onion Soup to exist, it's the cheese toast. Today's batch was a little spur of the moment so we didn't get the best bread or cheese. Normally I'd prefer a crusty rustic loaf from Trader Joe's and some decent Gruyere, instead it was deli sour dough and Swiss cheese. Here's the finished product.

Not the prettiest presentation ever, the cheese was taking too long to brown and we were done waiting, but here's the great thing, even with "sub par" ingredients and not enough patience to brown the cheese, it was absolutely delicious. Maybe its the home grown onions or the time spent playing with my knives, but I always enjoy this dish. If you like to cook and like onions (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?), give this dish a shot, just make sure to set aside two to three hours or so. You're not constantly busy, but you have to check in on things from time to time. Good Luck!