This week, when hubby had a half-day off work, I cooked us both a yummy soup for lunch. It’s definitely the time of year that I want to have something warm to eat at lunchtime (there was actually frost on the ground here this week!) so I looked up recipes for making one of my favourites; French Onion soup. Most recipes called for white wine and I didn’t really like the idea of adding it into my soup recipe, so I left that out and used brown musc0vado sugar on my onions instead of white sugar. I also cut out some of the butter and oil from the recipe – using fry light instead – so at least I know my soup is the ‘low fat’ version! One final adjustment was adding some red onions rather than all white. These subtle changes resulted in a more caramelised onion soup that was both sweet and salty and was the perfect lunch (accompanied by some traditional cheese-on-toast of course!). Here’s my recipe:
1kg red and white onions, 1 tablespoon light brown muscovado sugar, 1 teaspoon of garlic paste, 2 tablespoons of plain flour, l.5 litres of hot beef stock (made from stock cube).
Slice the onions and cook in Fry-Light for 5 mins and then add a little water to steam the onions and put the lid on for a further 5 minutes until they are soft. Sprinkle in the muscovado sugar and cook until caramelised, adding the garlic paste for the last couple of minutes of cooking. The onions should be really golden before you add in the flour. Stir it around to cook off the flour a little before adding the hot beef stock and allow to simmer for 5-10 minutes or however long you can bear to wait! Season to taste and serve in cute bowls with a wholegrain bread roll or this cheeky two-tone cheese-on-toast
Thanks to mom for the loan of the retro soup bowls for our lunch – aren’t they so cool with the little house design on the side? I think they are the perfect accessory for my retro living room but hey-ho they are going back to mum’s this week anyway! I hope you have a go at making this soup for yourself – it was as easy to make as it would have been opening a tinned soup and warming it on the hob – but it was so much nicer and I knew exactly what ingredients had gone into it – and probably loads less fat and calories!
