French Onion Soup: New Recipe

I'm on a roll.  I made my second soup in the past month last night - French Onion Soup.  It's weird that I chose some FOS to make because I think I've only ordered it in a restaurant one or two times in my life, but just the thought of it warms my belly.  I should order it more.  And after my experience cooking it last night, I'll be making it a lot more too.

I originally found a recipe on one of my favorite blogs, How Sweet It Is.  The recipe cooked the soup in the crock pot and if you know me you know that I'm dying to find more great crock pot recipes.  Silly me, I didn't read all the way to the bottom of the recipe to see that after one hour of cooking it still needs 6-8 hours to cook on it's own.  So I'd gone to the store, purchased all of the ingredients I needed and told Stephen and Richard that I'd have dinner ready at 8:00pm.  If I stuck to the recipe, we would have been eating at 1:00am.  God Bless the Internet and iPhones.  How Sweet It Is - I'll be back to ya later.

Where did I find my night saving recipe - The Food Network.  It's like it was meant to be.  I bet if I had not freaked out and calmly gone into the office I would have found the recipe in one of the 20 Food Network Magazines I have on the bookshelf, but I didn't.  I used modern technology.  

Here is the actual recipe that I followed.  I made some minor tweaks (since I wasn't shopping off of this recipe to begin with) but it turned out fantastic.  French Onion Soup brought to you by Tyler Florence of Tyler's Ultimate tv show.  Please go to the actual recipe page for the step by step directions, but I'll include the ingredients here and let you know where I made some slight changes:

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 4 onions, sliced (I got nervous with the size of the onion pile I had once I sliced all 4 onions - I used 3.5.  Don't be afraid - use 4 full onions)
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 2 bay leaves (No bay leaves used... I never remember Bay Leaves)
• 2 fresh thyme sprigs
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup red wine, about 1/2 bottle (I only had half a cup, so I used a half a cup of water with the half cup of wine)
• 3 heaping tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 quarts beef broth (get low sodium so you can control how salty you want the soup to be)
• 1 baguette, sliced
• 1/2 pound grated Gruyere (I got slices of Gruyere from the deli counter at the grocery store.  Much easier than grating it and cheaper)

Basic directions:

Slice onions and cook in the butter until soft, about 25 min.  Add wine and cook until evaporated (I had to drain the wine/water after 10 min).  Add flour and cook for 10 min.  Add beef broth and cook 10 min.  When ready to eat, place in bowls, top with bread and top bread with slice of cheese.  Broil until melted.

It was very easy and having done it once it will be easier for me the next time around.  It's almost Fall - start making some soup!