French Onion Soup & Our 3rd Anniversary

Since Travis had been traveling this week and it was our anniversary, I wanted to have something special made for supper. I settled on French Onion Soup from The Pioneer Woman. You can find the full recipe and her post here. I've never had French Onion Soup before, but let me tell you, it was pretty darn good!

You'll need 4 large or 6 medium yellow onions. I had a mix and some of my onions were on the small side, so I used 6.

You have to slice them thin, so I used this bad boy that I got from Santa for Christmas. It's an awesome mandoline and it'll take your finger off. It almost happened to me.

Slice the onions in half and peel.

Slice thin. A little less than 1/4" worked well for me.

Melt a stick of butter in a heavy pot. I used my cast iron pot because it has to go into the oven.

Throw all of the onions in, cover, and let the onions cook on the stove top in the butter for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

After 20 minutes, pop the pot into the oven, but leave the lid partially open so the onions will brown. Leave them in the oven for 1 hour, stirring at least once to make sure they're not burning or sticking.

You'll also need a generous cup of dry white wine, if you are so inclined. I was. So not only did I use a generous cup in the soup, but I poured myself a glass (or two), too!

Here's the rest of the team: wine, Worchestershire sauce (a few dashes, whatever suits your fancy), four cups of beef broth, four cups of chicken broth, and two cloves of garlic, minced.

You'll also need a few slices of French bread. Just butter one side and stick them under the broiler for a minute to get nice and toasty. But, you may want to wait until you're closer to serving so your bread won't be cold like mine was. Oops!

When an hour is up, take the pot out of the oven, stir the onions, scrape all of the good stuff off of the bottom of the pot and, with the burner off, pour in the wine. Turn the burner back on to medium heat and let simmer for five minutes.

Then add the remaining ingredients and stir. As you can see, my pot almost wasn't big enough, so I stirred carefully!
You want to let this simmer for 30 to 45 minutes, uncovered. The liquid will reduce to a much more manageable amount. Not to mention, your house will smell delicious! The first thing Travis said when Elizabeth and I met him outside was that we smelled like a restaurant. That's a pretty high complement if you ask me!

To serve, ladle the soup into a bowl, plop a couple of pieces of toasted bread in and top with cheese. The recipe calls for Gruyere, but I substituted the more budget friendly Swiss cheese. The recipe also says to put this back under the broiler so that the cheese will melt and bubble, but we were hungry, and there was no time for things like that!

It was truly a wonderful soup! So good, and really didn't taste a whole lot like onions at all. It definitely fulfilled my desire to have something special on our anniversary!