This was originally posted to my blog on Feb. 2002. kayay mentioned French Onion soup in my previous post about cooking onions and I could not resist the urge to dig this story on up. The next post to the old blog was reposted in my lj because that was when we set an oven mitt on fire.

Really, that was just not our week for cooking. XD

Tsaiko's Instructions on how NOT to make French Onion Soup

1. Start at 4:00, having carefully calculated that the recipe should be done between 5:30 and 6:00. Watch as the recipe laughs at your calculations.

2. For starters, you need to use a cookbook with vague instructions such as "cook the onions gently." How the heck do you cook onions gently? I don't know. Or stuff like "turn down the heat" without every telling you how high to turn the heat in the first place. This will confuse you and make you want to hurl said cookbook out a third story window and into a bonfire. Great place to start.

3. Your cookbook should also have strange ingredients that you've never heard of and can't find at the grocery store. What is vegetable stock? I don't know. And how the heck do you get stock from vegetables? Another mystery. Substitute beef stock and hope for the best. It should be noted that I now know how to make my own vegetable stock, or barring that, where to purchase it. For the longest time you could not find any vegetable stock at a regular supermarket in NC. Most likely because it is the land that believes that even vegetables should be cooked with meat.

4. Decide that the measurements given by the cookbook are off. The four large onions we got must have been twice as large as the ones used by the authors because we cut up three and filled our medium saucepan to the brim. Of course, I'm making the assumption the authors attempted this recipe in the first place, which is doubtful all thing considering.

5. How to cook: Start the onions. The cookbook says that it will take about 45-60 minutes to cook into a nice mahogany brown color. It lies. You cook the onions for 60 minutes. Transparent. So you up the heat. Cook for another 60 minutes. Kinda yellowish. Up the heat again. At this point, forget about cooking gently. Violate the damn suckers by nuking them in the microwave if you have to. Just get them done.

6. At this point be sure to send your roommate out to get you dinner, because guess what? Assuming these onions ever turn brown, you still have to simmer them in the broth for another thirty minutes.

7. Eat the dinner your roommate bought. It should be about 7:00 at this time. Your onions should be a very dark yellow but no where near the desired colors of brown or mahogany. Decide they are close enough and dump them into the beef stock. Set beef stock to simmer for thirty minutes.

8. Thirty minutes later, guess what? The beef stock is not simmering. Up the heat and let that sucker BOIL.

9. At 8:00 your soup is ready. Your apartment (or house) should now smell like onions for the next week or so. Your soup should look nothing like what's pictured. Take the whole pot and stick in the fridge.


If you follow these simple instructions, you wind up like me. With a pot of soup that may or may not be edible sitting in your fridge and four hours of your life wasted. And I wonder why I eat out so much...