Saturday, April 2, 2011

Onion soup


Good news! I am no longer alone.
My good friend Yam came to visit me for a week, so now there's actually someone to eat all the food I'm making, and maybe more importantly to 'approve' it's actually good.

Another good thing about Yam being over here (I'm not counting the fact I'm finally getting out of the since I haven't decided whether it's good or bad yet) is that she brought a camera with her.
I'm pretty sure you've noticed the photos I take are, well, 'Lo-Fi' to say the least. The reason for this is that I don't have a camera, it's just my very old, crappy cell phone (which, by the way, doesn't work as a cellphone), so hopefully, at least for this week I'll be able to take decent photos.
The first thing me and Yam made was onion soup. Like all soups, it works best when made with stock and not water. I didn't have any stock, and I wasn't going to use any powders or stuff like that, so we had to figure out how to make our soup more flavorful. What we did was to roast about half the onions, giving them a different tone. It came out really good, so I warmly suggest you try it.


Ingredients:

- Lots of onions (I think we used about 14).
- A few shallots (not necessary)
- 2 Tbs flour.
- 1 Tbs chopped thyme (or dry).
- 1 Dry chili.
- 2 Bay leaves.
- 1/2 a cup white wine.
- 80g butter.
- A few Sage leaves (I wasn't sure about those, so we left them attached to the stem, and took them out before adding the water, it did taste good, so it may be okay to leave it in).

Preparation:
- Preheat oven to 250c.
- Cut half of the onions to quarters, the other half to half-rings (shallots as well).
- Drizzle the onions quarters with olive oil and some balsamic vinegar, and put in the oven for about 20 minutes, until soft and slightly burnt.
- Meanwhile, simmer the rest of the onions along with the butter, sage, thyme, chili and bay leaves, until very soft and slightly brown.
- Add the roasted onions and flour.
- Turn up the heat and add the wine, you want the alcohol to evaporate.
- Add water (it's always better to put 'too much' water than too little, if its too watery, you can continue cooking it until the water evaporates, or take some out as stock).
- Cook for at least an hour.

That's it. Usually you serve it with baguette and cheese on top, cheese is a bit out of my price limit, so I just ended up making baguettes. To be posted next.

2 comments:

  1. no picture of the outcome?

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  2. Ha! I knew someone would notice ;) For some reason the outcome pictures all came out really blurry, I still have some left so I'll take another one soon.

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