French Onion Soup

After running a 15K race in on a chilly fall day, what could be better than some homemade soup for dinner?! Cooking is also great method of recuperation also. Once all the prepping is done, and the ingredients are in the pot, stirring isn't bad at all if you're perched at the stove on a stool with your glass of water right next to you!

This French onion soup has been making a regular appearance at our dinner tables for over a year now. It's SO incredible. It's simply delicious, while looking fancy, and being hearty and filling all at the same time. It is French Onion Soup, but on Epicurious.com it is: Onion Soup with Loads of Thyme and Giant Gruyere Crostini, which is much more fancy sounding. And let me tell you, the secret to this soup is the cheese. Gruyere cheese is a little pricey, but it is totally worth it to make this bowl of goodness blow your mind. Sometimes, if we're having a large group of people over and we don't want to spend too much money, we'll do a 50/50 mix of Swiss cheese and Gruyere, and it still is amazing. But quite honestly, we usually spend the money on the cheese because all the other ingredients are pretty cheap! And it really does make a lot! And now that we have our fancy-schmancy food processor, slicing the onions is a breeze!! I usually double the recipe on the website so that we can have some leftovers, because I want to have a fancy lunch the next day too! If you ever want to have a nice dinner for yourself or family, or if you need a crowd-pleaser meal, this one is sure to meet all expectations! It also leaves your house (or in our case, hallway in the condo building) smell delicious for hours! Some advice - I like to tie up the thyme sprigs so that it is easy to remove the one bundle rather than fish out all of the individual sprigs (I did that once - not fun). I usually like to try to cook with low sodium broth, but some of the flavor is lost with so much liquid, so I added in a beef bullion (which has a lot of sodium too, but considering I added it to more than four times the liquid it called for, I figure it will not add much sodium to each individual serving). Also, I will be soon trying to make this with vegetable broth so that our vegetarian friends can enjoy it as well.

In order to devour this soup, we use spoon, knife and fork (whatever works best) to get the contents in our mouths. Simply amazing.