Kitchen

I spent this morning pottering in the kitchen listening to podcasts.  Oh I love podcasts. I started by giving my recipe book area a thorough pull everything out and clean.  Aaah, sigh of satisfaction.  It didn't actually take very long and I just plodded along, resting when I needed to.

All this exposure to cook books in addition to a need to have something on hand to eat for lunch, I decided to make use of the large bag of onions I had in my basket and make French Onion Soup. Mine is a Jamie Oliver recipe.

On a very low heat melt some butter into some olive oil and toss in a handful of thyme, about 6 cloves of garlic, crushed and some bay leaves.  As the butter melted I cut up 1kg of onions.

Cook very slowly on a low heat, you want to bring out the sugars in the onion.  I popped the lid on and left it for 15 minutes, stirring occassionally while I continued cleaning.

 Once they are soft and gooey and cooked down - probably a few more minutes after I took the above photo - turn the heat up and brown the onions off.

I cooked these for a tiny bit longer and they were a golden brown and sticky.  Pour in 1.3l of stock. Any flavour will do but I like beef in this particular recipe.  Cook for a further 20 minutes or so.

Jamie tears in chunks of bread, artistically adds gruyere cheese and tosses his under the grill to present you with a soup covered in bready, melted cheese.  Although simple that was far too much faffing around for me so I just put some in a bowl and tossed some grated cheddar in as that is what I had on hand.  Oh my goodness.  It was absolutely delicious. I had forgotten how flavoursome and unexpected the flavour of this soup is.

I'm trying Jamie's Roast Chicken in milk tonight.  Will let you know how it goes.