French Onion Soup - A Delightful Kitchen Fail

Friends I am back in the kitchen!  On Saturday I spent the day slaving away over a delicious French Onion Soup, which I saw on Closet Cooking earlier in the week.

It looked so delectable, and we had a plethora of onions from our Riverford Organic vegetable box left over from the week since I don't really cook with onions too frequently.  Let me tell you, this soup was a labor of love - blood, sweat and tears all went into the making of this French classic.

I got to work on Saturday morning cutting up 4 pounds of the things. This is where the blood and tears came into to play - I cut myself and duh onions make you cry.

I didn't want to start the soup making process just then, so I popped them in the fridge for a bit.  When I went back a few hours later, the smell had permeated our entire kitchen.  Nice little foreshadowing of things to come.

The onions take about 2-3 hours to caramelize, and need to be stirred every 15 minutes.  Like I said labor of love right?  By that point our whole house smelled of onions.  I followed Kevin's recipe exactly, (except I replaced beef stock with vegetable stock) and soon I ended up with this....

The crusty french bread, the melted emmental, oh boy, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.  It was simply perfect for a crisp fall lazy weekend dinner.  So perfect in fact, I went back for seconds.  Nick on the other hand, was not feeling well, and only ate a tiny bit.

Now you may think the review of this soup should end there, and maybe some of you more sensitive types should stop reading now, but if I were to recommend for you to make this soup I feel like I would be doing you a huge disservice.  Yes I know I said it was good and I went back for seconds and yes that gooey cheese may be calling your name, but don't do it.

You see by 6am the following morning I woke myself up with a thundering case of the French Onion Soup Dutch oven.  When my darling husband awoke to the putrid lingering smell of my onion puffs, he had to immediately remove himself from the same room as me.  I'm not sure even my dog wanted to be around me.

I had many errands to run on Sunday, but my French Onion shame nearly left me housebound.  In the end I decided that the show must go on and I didn't have time to be embarrassed, so I did go out.  One of my tasks was to get a dress to wear to a wedding, and let this be a public apology to the fitting room assistant.  Darling, that je ne sais quoi you smelled, that was me.

What came first, the soup that made the French man smell, or the smelly Frenchmen that the soup was named after?  I may never know.  But I do know that the leftovers of this labor of love were thrown out by my husband who said, "If you love me, you will never make this soup again."

Trust me, je t'aime, baby.