Oh there's some other stuff about free will but that's mostly a bug in the system that no one pays much attention to.
I have never in my life chopped, diced or gotten to close to an onion. When I was young I became a pro at sliding, working and scraping onions off of any food item ever purchased. I hated the smell, the flavor and the way the stench clung to your skin like a bad house guest rash.
About a year into dating my husband his genetic predisposition for an onion intolerance kicked in and he joined me on the "We Onion Haters Club" side of the world.
Flash forward a few years with the liberal use of the squiggly lines wipe and we both realize that I actually like the flavor of seriously dead and buried caramelized onions and they don't seem to bother his stomach much.
Yesterday, against all common sense, I decided to try hitting C once just to see what happened and attempted something with the dreaded Onion.
Uncertain of what in the hell these strange papery hard objects were I picked up a few at the grocery store, sniffed them, maybe lobbed one up in the air so it'd turn into a space ship. Sadly this did nothing to answer my rather pertinent question "How exactly does one cut into an onion?"
A few things I learned from my experience.
1. Peel off the paper first, it helps to gouge out the ends but is a bit harder to smash it like garlic.
2. I don't cry much from the onion enzymes, no my eyes BURN with the fury of 1,000 Star Wars fans that just watched the new editions to the Blu-Ray.
3. They may look innocuous rolling around almost comically but turn your back for even a minute and those onions will take you out man.
Okay so the onions are all sliced up, my bleeding's been contained, now what?
I tried the recipe I found here but I would change a few things next time.
Ingredients
- 6 large red or yellow onions, peeled and thinly sliced.
- Olive oil
- 1/4 teaspoon of sugar
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 8 cups of beef stock, chicken stock, or a combination of the two (traditionally the soup is made with beef stock)
- 1/2 cup of dry vermouth or dry white wine
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/4 teaspoon of dry thyme
- Salt and pepper
- 8 slices of toasted French bread
- 1 1/2 cups of grated Swiss Gruyere with a little grated Parmesan cheese
They went in looking like this.
And about half way through looked like this and were actually starting to smell dare I say it, palatable.
Once the onion are a healthy shade of brown and translucent add in the garlic, the stock, the wine, the bay leaf and the thyme and let that all simmer together in ooey gooeyness for a half hour.
This is where I did and would do things differently. By the time the soup boiled down it was about 75% onion to 25% broth so I say double the broth unless you like to pretty much eat onions that are slightly damp. I also had no bay leaf even though I thought I did but they have a sneaky way of vanishing into the inner dimension contained within my cupboards so I only added the thyme.
Not that any of that mattered as the wine was really over powering, some of it could have been because the only white wine I had left was a white cranberry that certainly had a strong potency or the whole face that most of the beef broth went bye bye.
Again I didn't have French bread or fancy cheeses or any of that so I toasted a slice of wheat bread, cut it in half, added some mozzarella and parmesan to the top and melted/toasted it under the broiler for 10 minutes.
Here it is, my first attempt at doing anything with onions:
My husband said it was a lot fancier than he was expecting and gobbled all of his down and some of mine.
I'm still not much on speaking terms with onions and am going mad keeping a fine layer of glade in the air to keep the dreaded cooking onion smells at bay but it was certainly very fallish and pretty damn snooty for such a cheap meal.
I may even try it again unless one of them comes for my other finger.
3 comments:
i have found the secret to a good french onion soup is to cook the holy fuck out of the onions. Like they should be really brown like a walnut wood color before adding anything other than the garlic and the oil 9and some would argue you dont cook garlic that long it hurts it but i digress) the longer you cook them, the sweeter they get, and the more they dissolve into the broth when you finally add it.
I worked for panera bread back before they got all big and corporate (they started right down the street from where i grew up) and that is how they make their soup...which is the bar i unconsciously set for all things french soup-y
thank you for this erlyn! I do think the right thing to do is cook the holy hell out of them. Sadly, my bay leaves also went MIA for this mission...
I cooked them not enough. I think i will try to go holy hell brown next time... all the recipes are the same, it's damn simple, but why o why did it not turn out... should I simmer for like 4 hours?
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