No soup for you!

After a busy week, I am just now getting around to blogging about some of last weekend's culinary creations. With temperatures below 20 degrees for most of the weekend and part of a loaf of French bread to use, I decided to make French onion soup using this recipe. Here are all of the ingredients: low sodium beef broth, dry white wine (I used a Spanish wine), French bread, kosher salt, pepper, Fleur de Sel for finishing, one huge onion and another medium one, and some butter. Fleur de Sel, a kind of sea salt, is apparently Something White People Like. Mother of Ken and I recently discovered the magic of really good sea salt, and if liking it makes me a white person, then so be it.

I started by melting the butter and adding the onions to my Dutch oven:

I sprinkled some sugar on the onions to help them caramelize and let them cook on medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally:

Here's what they looked like after 20 minutes or so:



Next, I added some flour and let it cook with the onions for a minute:




Then I added white wine:




When the wine had reduced by about half, I added the beef broth:

I let the whole thing simmer after adding some salt, pepper, and thyme:

In the meantime, I toasted slices of French bread and got my new soup bowl ready (Mother and Father of Ken gave me these red soup bowls with lids for Christmas). Here I have one slice of toasted bread seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper in the bottom of the bowl:

I filled the bowl with soup, added a sprinkle of Fleur de Sel, fresh Italian parsley, and some grated Pecorino Romano:

Finally, I topped the soup with another slice of toasted bread and made a salad to go with it:

This was really good soup, but I think it needed more salt. I had enough leftover to fill three storage containers and I added some salt to each of them before I put them in the freezer.

When I reheated some of the leftover soup the next day, I added a dash of Kitchen Bouquet browning and seasoning sauce, which helped to round out the flavors and deepen the color.