Thursdays Are For Cooking

The subject is soup. Soup – the Stuff that Immortals dream of.

Well, they just wish they could cook as well as mortals, which is why the Immortals always show up with an empty bowl and a spoon and that sad look in their eyes.

Soup of any kind is good. Onion, beef-based veggie, chicken noodles w/veggies (and I do mean noodles!), cream of potato, cream of mushroom. It’s still chilly outside and the forecast in my AO is for rain today and some snow tomorrow… and I want to know what happened to Spring?

So here’s a good and simple recipe for real onion soup:

One onion per person

Beef broth

Salt, pepper, thyme and oregano, plus a bay leaf or two

Red or white wine is optional, but you want to make soup, not get stewed.

Kleenex

Croutons, sliced baguette and cheese (Swiss, gouda, mozzarella – all good!)

Directions:

Peel the onion the easy way: cut it in half, pull off the skin and outer layer. Slice each half on the mandolin if you have one; if not, then just do a coarse chop.

Put the onion into a pot, add the beef broth to cover. How much beef broth? How hungry are you? One 28 ounce box of broth should suffice for a couple of servings. If you want a lot of onion soup (yes, please!!!), add more. The broth and sliced or diced onion cook together, so that the onion can weep tears into the broth to season it, and the broth can throw thyme and oregano at the onion to comfort it. Salt and pepper are to taste, always, and you can throw in a bay leaf if you like.

It is okay to cook the onions to softness before you put them into the pot. That’s a personal choice. But it’s also okay to just simmer them slowly in the beef broth without sautéing them first. If you want this for lunch, start after breakfast. If you want it for dinner, start after lunch. Very slow simmer, lowest temp or flame on the burner, put a lid on the pot to keep the broth in the pot. Yes, you are allowed to peek and test the flavor levels.

The croutons you can buy already toasted and ready to use. The baguette slices go on the top of the onion soup, with the cheese (sliced or shredded, your choice) on top of the baguette. To get the nice browning, 1 to 2 minutes in the broiler at 375F to 400F with the door open, or bake it at 375F  for 3 to 5 minutes in the oven, on a tray.

The Kleenex is for when you peel the onions the hard way instead of ripping the outermost layer and skin off the bulb, or for when you’re trying to slice them across the bulb by hand.

Get more onions now!

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I see more rumblings about “the next Covid attack” coming out of the general direction of WDC, so take note: they are a pack of idjits, but they like to surprise people with the wrong surprises. And if anyone is wondering about how to stay warm when the weather is rotten cold and sloppy, the new governor of New York has declared that using carbon-based fuels such as natural gas and LPG to heat your home and cook are going to be banned, firstly in new construction and then (eventually, I’m sure) everywhere else. Those people are absolutely nuts, but the nutsy-stuff is going around.  We need a really nasty surprise weather front to slam some reality into those people, something on the order of a blizzard in mid-July.

Category: Cooking, Economy