French Onion Soup!

Merry Christmas to all!

Some traditions just have to be abolished or at least altered. In our case is the Christmas Eve tradition of having seafood gumbo. Earlier this year Nikki ate some crawfish and got very ill. We went to the ED...her bp was 60/30 and had whelps all over her body. The doctor advised that she no longer eat shellfish. What? We live in Louisiana! It's just about all we eat! So here comes Christmas Eve and we have a dilemma...do we go ahead with the seafood gumbo and she just eat something else or do we do something else? Well, I have been craving some french onion soup..........

This is my first tutorial so please bear with me. I know I didn't take enough pictures (I kept forgetting) lol.

If you ever follow any of my recipes, know that I hardly ever measure....I got that from my dad, who, IMHO, was the best cook I know. And I know eating! It's another reason why I really don't like baking...it's to precise for me. So, without further ado...here is my recipe for French Onion soup.

French Onion Soup

5 large yellow onions
a couple sticks of butter
garlic
flour
beef broth - I use 'Better than Boullion' concentrated beef broth.
water
Worcestershire sauce
swiss cheese
baguettes

Slice the onions. Put one stick of butter into a large soup pot and melt. Throw in the onions and let them cook....now, don't hurry this...you don't want the onions 'fried' or burned...it took me over two hours for this stage.

After you get some onion juice in there, add as much garlic as you want. I buy whole, peeled garlic in a jar and just tossed about twenty toes in there whole. Again, this is according to your liking for garlic. Uh yeah, we like garlic. I would cover the pot, let the onions sweat, then uncover, and repeat.

When the onions were starting to get brown, I added about 2 tablespoons flour and stirred it well. Don't like the taste of raw flour. I would say I used half a jar of 'Better than Boullion'. It has the consistancy of a thick cake batter. I used around 12 cups of water....first I added around 8 cups, tasted, then added the rest. I added a few dashes of worcestershire sauce and tasted. Tasted pretty darn good! Bring to a boil, turn down and let simmer. I let it simmer another hour or so, then turned off and just let it sit on the stove.

I sliced a baguette loaf and placed them on a rack on a cookie sheet to dry a bit.

Everyone took showers and got ready to go to Midnight Mass. It was a beautiful mass, with gorgeous greenery and poinsettias and a big ole decorated tree. The choir sounded so sweet and the homily was thought provoking, as usual. We got home around 1:30am and I started heating the soup and preheated the oven to 400 degrees. Put the baguette slices in and let them get a light golden, then put a slice of swiss cheese on em, and put em back in to melt the cheese. Ladle the soup in a bowl, then put a baguette (or two, or three) on top. Enjoy!

It was soooooo good!

I hope to make more 'tutes' as I love soup and plan on making it often. One of my New Years' resolutions is to lose weight (same one for the last 30 years!), and I'm gonna try to eat more broth based soups to help me. I'm new to all this blog bidness, but I plan to be more consistant (another resolution) and post my wight loss (positive thinking...you guessed it! another resolution) here as well as my needlework and recipes.

I hope you try this recipe (if you want a 'real' recipe, just google french onion soup), it's worth it!

Blessings to you,
~Denise