The Return of the Evil Chef

One thing I keep meaning to do for my webpage is something on how much I like to cook.

I remember when I was young, and would help my mother in the kitchen. She used to say to me, "You like to eat? You damn well better learn how to cook--I'm not doing this all my life." Sounds better in Spanish, maybe--anyway, I've always enjoyed cooking. I'm very proud of my mother's recipe for rice, as most people who know me will attest: I keep insisting that they try it. (I resent the needed effort: if I'm trying to force something on you, it should be taken as a given that it's a good thing.) Then there's fettucine al bachelor, my signature pasta dish. So lively that my ex-roommate, Hammerhead, described it as intolerable. All because I use hot Italian sausage, rather than sweet. Whatever.

So here I was today, more or less out of work, since the web interface to my current software testing contract job was still down. I don't know at what point in the day, sitting around on the couch with the weather overcast, that I decided I would do something new for dinner. And I settled on French onion soup.

Now, I love onions. Raw onions--garlic, too, but that's a different discussion. As it is, I've had French onion soup in several restaurants, and it's always so heavy on cheese as not to be about onions. So I checked out my favorite reference source, the Good Cook series from Time/Life. Turned up a simple recipe for onion soup, and it seemed easy enough: fry up some onions, add water and boil, simmer for a bit, and you have soup. I remembered someone telling me about a restaurant in downtown Tacoma that served up a seven-onion soup: sounded ambitious, so I ran a Google on "seven onion soup", and turned up a recipe from Emeril. Looked basically the same, only with a step or two that I could omit (didn't have to bake any bread, could skip the bacon if I used extra butter, etc.).

So I spent about twenty minutes chopping onions: yellow onion, red onion, Vidalia sweet onion, shallot--good stuff. Fried all that in a two-quart saucepan, lots of butter. Added salt, thyme, lots of fresh ground pepper, and a bay leaf. While that sauteed, chopped up a leek and the white parts of a bunch of scallion. Threw that in, too. When all that softened into a thick pulp, I added some flour and stirred it around. After that browned some (maybe not as much as it should have, in retrospect), I added a quart of chicken broth. Let that boil, then simmered for an hour. Added half a cup of cream, boiled it again, and let it simmer down in time for serving.

The green leafstem of scallions are better known as chives. Chopped them up fine, grated some Parmesan cheese, laid these over a bowl of the soup.

I like it. Very good, if you like onions--and I love onions. Might need some fine-tuning, as far as flavoring goes--I may have overdone the thyme, not had enough pepper. Think I'll try tarragon. But I can say, onion soup is very good without a layer of mozzarella cheese clogging the flavor up.