French Onion Soup

There's something in me that keeps pushing me to try things I might not like. Which is why I have a habit of accepting large quantities of vegetables I don't really eat. Like onions. Like lots and lots of onions. So I push on and try new things. I've made french onion soup once before and wasn't crazy about it. This time, however, I had no one to pawn it off on. So I ate my obligatory bowl. Then I realized that I couldn't just dump it out, so I ate another. And another. Then I finally tore down the mental block and realized that I liked it. Of course, I ate is less as a soup than as a heavy sauce for my hunk of cheesy toast, but still.

It got eaten- all of it. And I liked it, damn it. It was so good. I'm a believer. Well, as long as I can strain out the chunks of onion because I'm still a goof. I'm almost so converted that I want to use the rest of my onion stash to make another batch, but I've got another recipe waiting in line.

Caramelizing onions still kind of freaks me out. I'm always afraid that they're burning, then afraid if I take them off too soon I'll just be making partially cooked onion soup. I usually pull through with something resembling caramelized, but I can never be sure. So I took tons of pictures.

All of these...



Filled my big stock pot to here...



Then reduced to this.



Here's my nice dark brown stock.



And the finished product. Yeah, the onions here are for show.



Make sure to check out the recipe over at Baking Bites. As a side note, I used Rachel Ray's beef stock for mine and it turned out pretty well. I haven't tried enough other brands to give a good comparison though.