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.

Someone Send Me to Fat Camp

I made this cake yesterday.

I needed to use up some rhubarb, so I told myself I would make it and bring it to rowing.

But then I burned it....

I was too embarrassed to bring it to practice.

So I ate it by myself...

Why would I do that?

I need help.

Lars? Tony Perkins?

Mallow Making : Take 2

After my last failure I've been searching high and low for a decent veggie mallow recipe.  One without too many weird ingredients and I came up with this.


I don't want to go into the details of the recipe.  But I followed it pretty much perfectly.  And I ended up what can only be described as a viscous milky liquid that resembles... well I won't say what it resembles because I am a lady you know... lets just call it stuff.

What I had was stuff.  With a crunchy layer of browned sugar on top.

Nothing even close to a marshmallow.  Just gross. Disgusting!  And now I'm sad.  Very very sad.

I just want a mallow!

My Peeps are Totally Failures!!

Hi Friends.  I need to apologize.  Last week I promised that I would have an amazing vegetarian peep recipe up and running.  Unfortunately, I've had a few pitfalls along the way.  I attempted to create vegetarian peeps using this recipe and this recipe, from who else - Martha Stewart of course!

Problem 1 : I needed to get my chubby little fingers on a candy thermometer.  Easier said than done.  After a couple days of fruitless searching, I ended up buying one off Amazon.

On Saturday it arrived so I headed to the kitchen with tons of enthusiasm!  I had purchased food coloring and a new piping set and I recruited the husband as sous chef and figured we would have great fun creating new peep animals.  I had an underwater theme in mind - peep octopus anyone???

First I used used my food coloring to color some sugar.  I only had red and yellow... But I do what I can.

Problem 2 : I added the gelling agent to the water.  I used agar flakes, to replace regular gelatin, and substituted them on a one to one ratio.  We didn't realize anything was wrong at this point, but looking back I don't think agar is a direct substitute for gelatin.

Next we boiled the sugar and water mixture, bringing it to the soft-ball stage as Martha instructs.

Check out our stove- how awful is that?

We took it off the heat, stirring, and then using a hand mixer to attempt to form soft marshmallowy peaks.

Problem 3 : Our hand mixer appears to have been made around the same time they invented electricity.  Thus, it doesn't move too fast, and no soft peaks were formed.  We transferred the syrupy mixture to our food processor with the whipping attachment in place, but no cigar.  We got a few bubbles in the syrup and thats pretty much it.

I'm totally devastated.  I feel like I lied to you, and I can't even eat my feelings with fresh peeps.  I just want to bite off their stale and delicious heads like the rest of omnivorous Christian society the week after Easter, but alas, I'm stuck with nothing more than a gooey pot of sugar water.  Martha has never let me down before, so I am blaming my appliances and agar gelatin replacement.  

I hope you can forgive me!!!

ps.  I found some gelatin free mallow recipes, but not for piping mallow, and none of them used agar.  I will be investigating this matter further.