French Onion Soup

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How I miss the times when we were footloose and fancy free.

No plans, no work, we'd get up when we wanted. Go take pictures four to five days a week as we pleased. I had time to try new recipes.

Life was indeed very good.

Now it's like I'm back at work. When we're not working on the house, I feel guilty, like I should be working on the house.

And I have no doubt that my blog entries were a lot more interesting than they are now. I loved writing about our travels and the new things we discovered . I loved looking at my photographs and learning new ways to manipulate them.

Now, I'm not sure I should keep up the blog while we're clearing the house. I'm pretty sure everyone isn't interested in all the junk we're selling, and it sure seems like we're not doing much of any interest these days.

But I still cook.

Not like I did when I had nothing but time, but I still find myself looking for new recipes. With the abundance of fresh vegetables here on the central coast, I find myself looking for new ways to serve them.

Today, we went grocery shopping at Costco. I love Costco, especially since we have the big refrigerator in the house. With that available to us, I'm much less reticent to buy in the large quantities that Costco demands.

Today, onions were on the shopping list, but the smallest amount we could buy was ten pounds (for just $3.50). It would take the two of us forever to use up ten pounds of onions, but then I remembered French onion soup.

YUM, I threw the onions in my cart.

Then I got home and looked at my recipe. I haven't made it in years and somehow I forgot that I'd have to stand over a pot of sweating onions for close to an hour to get them started for the soup. Not my idea of a good time at all. No wonder I haven't made it in so long.

Hoping for some kind of reprieve (and some good soup) I went on the internet and found a recipe where, instead of sweating and caramelizing the onions on the stove top, you do it in the oven.

Hey this looked do-able.

By the time I got home, it was close to 7pm, way too late to start the whole project. But wait, the recipe says you can caramelize the onions in the oven, then put them in the fridge and cook the soup up to three days later!

So that's exactly what I'm doing. The rig smells like sweet roasting onions. They're turning into a nice caramel colored mush, and in a day or two, we should have soup.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

One more culinary note . . .

We haven't been able to find whole chiles in the can since we've been here in California, hence, no green chile stew. We miss having chile all the time, (shades of New Mexico). Then today, we discovered a Mexican market down by the ocean, and there they were, my beloved chiles. They were kind of expensive ($3.70 a can) but by buying a case, I was able to get them at $3.00 per can. Even though we have the onions for the soup ready to go, tomorrow it will be pork with green chile.

So for a day at least, we can pretend we're back in New Mexico.