Onion Soup

I have crossed over to the dark side. I finally found a job after searching for 8 months!!! Yay, for me! Now, my story continues as a full time working mother. Meals will still need to be planned on the cheap and "waste not, want not" will always be my motto! I have figured out my New Years resolution this week as well. Though I already am a bit nuts about recycling, I plan to reuse more of the products that come into my home. An environmental science teacher told me once that reduce, reuse, recycle is stated in the order of appropriate actions. Reduce the amount of products you use and consume, reuse whatever you can at all times, and recycle anything that is left. It is a dream of mine to own a home with a garden outside and a compost pile to use all the scraps that are not able to be tossed into a "broth bag". I'm a green thumb with big dreams! I always feel my supply of Tupperware is completely lacking, so I decided my first step in this reuse process will be to save glass and plastic jars. They can be washed after original use and be used to portion out my homemade vegetable broth, which will then be frozen. I will also use them for single serving lunch portions to bring to work and to freeze leftover soups or sauces. Here I go, getting off track, when I haven't even jumped onto the track of intended conversation....my onion soup.

As my first day of real work in a long time, I was nervous that I would not be able to provide a nice meal for Sophia and I. Plus the added pressure of Meatless Monday (as much as I love it, Mondays take a lot of planning and prepping to go meatless), I needed to figure out what I could toss into my crock pot. In order to save myself a trip to the food store, I had to work with what I had. The main vegetable I had on stock was onions. I had a whole bag of onions for some unknown reason. Most likely I needed just one for a recipe, but buying a while bag was more cost efficient. Onions will never go to waste, especially when they can be frozen for broth. As much as I love it, I knew I was not going to be able to do french onion soup, because I don't have bowls heat resistant enough to put under the broiler, but I researched french onion soup recipes to gather some ideas of how I should do this.

Even though I was looking for the simplest directions possible for crock pot onion soup, every single recipe I found instructed me to caramelize sliced onions before cooking them in soup. So there I was this morning, awake extra early and cutting onions to caramelize onions in a skillet. I sliced up 5 onions and cooked them over medium heat with half a stick of butter. All the recipes I read also told me to be patient with the caramelizing process. It took about 20 minutes. Part of me wished I had thought to slice and caramelize the onions before I went to bed, but oh well....maybe next time I will think ahead. I let the onions cook as I got dressed and brushed my teeth. I also sliced up two carrots to throw into the crock pot once the onions were ready. So I did just that. I loaded up the crock pot with the cooked onions, the raw carrots, 3 cups of vegetable broth, some Worcestershire sauce, a bay leaf, and some rosemary. Three cups of broth seemed to be enough to cover the onions with liquid, but not by much as to not make the soup to liquidy. The recipes said to use beef broth, but I had my vegetable broth in the freezer. Plus it is Meatless Monday, so the beef broth could be frowned upon. (Mind you if I only had beef or chicken broth in my freezer, that is what I would use. I love the idea of Meatless Monday and I try my best to stick to the rules, but I am not going to run out and buy vegetable broth if I have a homemade substitute in my freezer.) After adding about 3 Tbsp of Worcestershire sauce and the other seasonings I've mentioned, I set the crock pot to low and went on my merry way.

The soup turned out to be just what I wanted. I probably added too much butter in the process of cooking which didn't seem to add much buttery flavor anyway. Next time I try onion soup, I will try to leave the butter out for healthy, skinny momma reasons. Served along with grilled cheese, I guess I did have all the elements of my favorite french onion soup, just as separate components. Maybe I didn't need that cheese either, but a girl has to eat! Sophia is a huge fan of dipping grilled cheese into any sort of soup I serve it with. She did eat some of the soup alone, but stuck mostly with the dipping of her sandwich. For a picky eater, she surprises me when she will eat onions. She will not eat them raw (who does? yuck!), but she definitely does not turn her nose up to a cooked onion. It is like a little ray of hope concerning my child's tastes.