i’ve spent a fair bit of the day prototyping, some on paper and some not, and fussing a bit with an upset stomach that descended upon me last night.

these activities combined to mean that, until about an hour ago, i had consumed a cup of coffee, a piece of toast, some crackers, some ginger ale, and a small head of raw broccoli that i forced in front of myself during a moment when the internal babysitter took over.
after a while, i got tired of sitting, and got up to walk around for a bit. in so doing, i experienced one of those fearful moments where i realized that i was going to be very very hungry very very soon, and i’d better do something about it while i still had the energy to push buttons or boil water.

scanning the kitchen i saw a loaf of day-old bread that lucy had given me on friday (making it three-day-old bread, i suppose), with which i had decided i should make onion bread pudding. this is quite easy (yesterday i got flak from erik for saying that dumplings would be easy, but this time, i really mean it! ;), but that requires milk, of which i am lacking.
sigh.
thinking about onions made me remember a small vat of caramelized onion goo that i had recently extricated from my freezer in an attempt to make myself consume it before fossilization took hold. i don’t even remember what exactly i did when i made these onions, but they were an experiment in intensifying caramelization, and let’s just say that the experiment was more of a success than i intended. they are overpowering, and i had frozen them because they were just too decadent for me to consider throwing away, but i was not having luck thinking of what to do with them, and after moderate success with one batch (i made cheesy polenta stuff, which was good, but i didn’t want that flavor again for a long, long time), i had decided it was best to offer the other to my future creative self.

let me just take a second here to say that i am frickin brilliant.

i stare at these onions, i stare at this bread, i think too intense for their own good, and with the clarity of the light which shines upon the angels of the heavens, my brain says “make soup!”
you see, once you have onions, onion soup takes like 15 seconds. you just dilute them. and heat the mixture up. and add bread and cheese.
tada!

now, i know that i was hungry.
and i know that i am pleased with myself for thinking of a way to use these onions.
but seriously, folks.
seriously.
this is quite possibly the best onion soup ever made.

and i don’t say things like that lightly.

is it the secretly intense, freezer-aged onions that i will never be able to replicate (sigh)?
perhaps.
is it the fact that my cookbook was wise in advising me to add a bit of wine and parsley?
perhaps.
is it the fact that i was wise in taking that advice, but ignoring the bay leaf, thyme, salt, and vinegar, because it didn’t seem to need them?
perhaps.
is it the way the sesame seeds in the bread mingle with the broth, giving it a really subtle yet amazing undertone?
perhaps.
is it the nearly-too-pungent raclette that i had in the back of my fridge that seemed equally destined for this union?
perhaps.

but even with all of those competing perhapses, i think the real winner of the story is this:
after already convinced of the merit of making the soup, i realized that i had no broth, and intense as the onions were, i wasn’t sure that they would stand up to a full pot of water.
i will not avail you with my frustrations with broth lately, because you don’t care, and this is already too long, but suffice to say it kind of wrankled me to think that such a lovely idea might be sullied by a lack of something that i really want to always have at my fingertips, and i searched my brain and my cabinets for ideas.

i hit upon a stocking stuffer from christmas – tomato bouillon, which i had been a bit mystified about, to tell you the truth.
at first glance, it seems a great thing to have on hand for vegetable soups and such, but if you read the fine print (or look at the little picture and sing the “one of these things is not like the other ones” song), you will realize that it is actually tomato and Chicken bouillon, and since much of the time when i make tomato-based soups i am either playing vegetarian or feeding vegetarians, it was unclear when a time would arise to make use of such a substance.
in the meantime i just enjoyed reading the ingredients in spanish.

now however, it seemed time to go for it.
tomato chicken onion soup wasn’t quite my original vision, but it didn’t sound Bad, and besides, i wasn’t convinced that the onions were going to be any good no matter what i did with them, so it seemed better to give them a go with the bargain bin stocking stuffer bouillon than to spend several dollars on store-bought broth that i don’t even like much anyway.
and thus, a heavenly nectar was born.
i’ll have to make something else with the bouillon to decide how much credit to give to the broth and how much to the onions, and i’ve already mentioned the convergence of bread, wine, and cheese that definitely contribute to a greater-than-the sum-of-its-ingredients experience, but i’m just sayin.
for a half-hour of effort at the end of a day where i didn’t think about dinner once…
it don’t get much better than this, my friends.

now a bit more work, and then to bed.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 8:46 pm and is filed under food, things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.