It’s fall.  daylight savings time os over.  It’s been really cold.  I decided it was time to make a big batch of French Onion Soup.

Sunshine, blue skies, and otherwise glorious weather.

Go figure.

But I made the soup, anyway.  I like onion soup.  Besides, I had almost 10 pounds of onions.

It’s a rather easy soup to make.  I make it as a beef and onion soup.  Very non-traditional.  I’m not sure why or when that happened, but it’s been going on for years.

First, you start with the onions.  This batch was the aforementioned 9 1/2 pounds of onions.

Slice them and put them in a big pot with a stick of butter.

Cook, stirring occasionally, until they brown and caramelize.  This batch took about 1 1/2 hours to reach the right color.

At this point you need to be stirring a lot more often and really scraping the bottom of the pot to get all that good caramelized flavor.

Meanwhile – and this is where I defy tradition – I brown beef cubes (today I used about 1 1/2 pounds of tri-tip I cut up) and after it was browned, deglazed the pan with about a half-cup of sherry.

All of that went into the pot with the onions.

I then added 2 quarts of beef stock.

I added a bay leaf, about a teaspoon of French herbs, salt and pepper.  I then brought it to a boil and covered and simmered it for about 45 minutes.

Neither of us are crazy about cheese-encrusted croutons floating (or glued) to our soup bowls, so I just added some grated cheese to the top.  They are really a pain-in-the-ass to eat.  I’d rather just dunk some french bread.

I used a blend of onions; 6 pounds of Mayan sweet onions and 3 1/2 pounds of white onions.  The soup was definitely on the sweet side.  In a good way, though.

And there’s lots of leftovers.  A bunch for us and a big container to bring over to Victor’s mom tomorrow.

She really likes my onion soup!