As SoupFest draws closer and closer, my wife and I can barely hold our excitement, so we decided to make a batch of French Onion soup on Sunday, and we’ve been eating it all week. This wasn’t a shortcut recipe, I sautéed a shitload of onions for the full half hour slowly reducing the heat as I went. The payoff for letting those onions go the full distance is totally worth it. Like, you THINK your onions are ready, but they’re not – you need to let them go until they are almost 1/10th of what you started with..  like look at this – here is a picture that was taken when the onions started to brown –

And here’s a picture when they were almost ready:

And here’s a shot of them in the crockpot – after I added the garlic and beer (yes, we used beer)

Dark, right? not a lot, right? that’s a whole flippin bag of onions friends.

Oh and garlic. I love chopping garlic – I have a sweet knife that my brother gave me one year as a christmas gift – it’s a shun… I love it.

I like to mix salt in with my garlic so it starts to sweat right there on the cutting board, then I like to sculpt it into a brick and sit on standby:

Delicious.

Now before I continue – you need to know –  the BEST onion soup in Buffalo is Dustin Murphy’s onion soup at ThinMan Brewery. I am overdue for a bowl of that action, I’m telling you that stuff is unbelievable. I had the luxury of hearing him explain how he makes it and what ingredients end up in it – nothing but love – gold and love. The lady and I didn’t have nearly the ingredients he uses, we used the beer, like I said (porter) and beef broth, and then she worked her magic on the seasoning side of things. That sat in the crock pot until the next day. We don’t have the special crocks for onion soup, nor would we enjoy cleaning them if we did – so we improvised by creating open faced cheese croutons.  I fried up rye bread with butter in a pan, then generously coated the pieces in cheese and put under the broiler.

These are great for putting in the soup.

So we’ve been eating this all week. And after yesterday with the grilling of steak – I was able to have leftover steak too! with fried onions and cilantro, then some jalapeno salt. Combined with a salad – I’m feeling pretty damn good right now!

Cheers everyone !