The Perfect Onion Storm

Tonight I looked in the fridge and the freezer and noticed a theme among the ingredients we had lying around. We had tons of garlic, vidalia onion, red onion, leeks, frozen beef stock I'd made a month or two ago, and even a bottle of wine that we hadn't cared for and I put aside for cooking of some kind.

The conditions were perfect for making onion soup.

While most people insist on calling this French onion soup I find this designation annoying. Besides, we regretfully do not own any of the standard brown coup crocks one needs to make a proper onion soup.



At the store I could not find any soup crocks so instead I purchased two acorn squash, hollowed them out, roasted them, and used those as the vessels for the soup. This is an unusual pairing but I was more concerned with having something I could bake in the oven than anything else.

For the soup I melted some butter and olive oil, then threw in whole sage leaves, crushed garlic cloves, red onion, vidalia onion, leeks, salt, and pepper and cooked it all down for about an hour. Then I put a little red wine in (actually a lot of red wine) and then finished with the beef broth. I then topped it with sliced bread and, in an attempt to pair a cheese with the squash, Piave.

Then I broiled the whole thing for a few minutes and served.



I've kind of stalled out in my autumn beer/Oktoberfest beer mission. I became too overwhelmed by the options. It's a little sad seeing how it's not even October yet and we're only a week into Fall but I'm sure I'll get up some more steam after I take some time off. It was convenient, however, since wine is probably a better pairing for this dish.

The wine was a tempranillo and it as quite good. With the amount of wine I put in the soup it seemed almost unnecessary to have additional wine to drink.

The resulting soup was tasty but I definitely used too much of the wine. And it was most definitely weird to serve it in a squash. But, I suppose, it was the responsible thing to do. Seeing that I only make onion soup once every ten years I guess it would be wasteful to purchase soup crocks and have them lying around for the rest of the decade.

I guess that's my contribution to the environment for 2010: biodegradable soup bowls.