This was French onion soup.
It was J's idea to use the leftover giant homemade Italian bread. I adapted a recipe from Cook's Illustrated. I used the recipe a long time ago and believe it turned out well. I thought I had all ingredients I needed. But the recipe called for 4 pounds of onions while I had 2 pounds and 13 oz. It was a very cold day, so I didn't go out to get more onions. The recipe was for 6 to 8 people, so it would be ok to reduce other ingredients to adjust the recipe to my lack of onion situation. Still it looked a lot of onions.
After 1 hour cook in the oven.
I needed to cook the onions another two and half a hour in the oven... and something happened. About 1/3 of onions looked too dark. It was supposed to be in dark brown color. Well, what was the definition of dark brown here? I checked the video of the recipe on Cook's Illustrated's website, but still I wasn't sure whether the color of my onions were right. But I gave up pretending everything was alright and admitted the 1/3 of onions in the pan were burned. Those parts must be too bitter. I sadly transferred what looked like dark browned onions from the pan to another new pan. Then I ended up with lesser onions. I skipped some steps of the recipe and changed the amount of beef and chicken soup stock because of this incident.
The finished soup looked alright and tasted fine. Good news! Maybe a little bit of bitterness here and there but that was acceptable. Rich deep flavor was surely found in the soup! It was the time to float my homemade Italian bread over the soup. Remember the bread was the beginning of the entire story of this French onion soup? The bowl needed only two slices each, so I couldn't use the bread up as we planned originally. Sesame bread in French onion soup may sound a little weird. It was fine at all.
I was generous with gruyere cheese topping. Like this.
And broiled the cheese until melting. Like that.
We enjoyed the French onion soup very much with a little carrot-tomato-broccoli salad bowl.
We had the exactly same dinner on the next day. The soup was wonderful like the first day. At that point I almost forgot the troubles I faced day before, just remembering how flavorful the soup was. I will make the soup again - VERY carefully.
