French Onion Soup

I'd been meaning to make this for a long time. On Saturday I stocked up with sufficient onions etc to construct some this Sunday for lunch, as well as having enough onions for the rest of the week. We do seem to get through a lot of onions in this household.
I did some research before starting to cook, which left me somewhat confused. To flour, or not to flour? Wine, or beer? How much sugar? And should it be white or brown? Delia Smith, or an untested recipe from the internet? And what had happened to the piece of French bread I had earmarked for the croutons? Turns out Younger Son had consumed that already, so  it was good old English bread. But at least that meant that I felt less guilty about using cheddar rather than gruyere.
As usual, I ended up with a hybrid... but it tasted good.

800g onions, peeled and thinly sliced. This resulted in a lot of tears.
50g butter
3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
1/2 level teaspoon granulated sugar
One can of beer (I was too mean to use wine; Tesco Everyday Value Bitter was fine)
2 pints of beef stock (2 elderly Tesco beef stock cubes and one beef Oxo cube)
Salt and pepper

And, for the cheese croutons:
4 slices bread
160g grated cheddar

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan, and cook the onions, garlic and sugar gently together for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Delia assured me that it would be browning nicely after 30 mins, and this browning would improve the colour and flavour of the soup. It wasn't even starting to look as if it was browning after 30 mins, so I turned up the heat for another 5 mins, stirring all the time. The onions reduced in volume somewhat, but stubbornly refused to brown.
I shrugged, poured the stock and beer in, brought it to the boil and simmered gently for a further hour and 15 minutes, then assembled the croutons, as follows:
Toast the bread; put it on a baking tray and cover with grated cheese. Try not to leave any bare bits. Pop the tray of cheesed-up bread under the grill for about 3 minutes until it is bubbling and starting to brown. While the cheese is grilling, put the soup into bowls. Float one "crouton" (or "cheese-on-toast", as we call it around these parts) in each bowl. (Yes, I know you're supposed to put the soup in bowls under the grill with floating croutons in it, but my soup bowls are wide and shallow with big rims and I don't think I could fit even 2 under at once.)

The family were somewhat bemused by the concept - "Cheese-on-toast? In onion soup?? but tucked in with gusto. I will definitely prepare this again, but next time I think I will slice the onions in a food processor as slicing them lovingly by hand was a rather tearful experience.

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in a hot tureen!

I've long been an Alice in Wonderland fan and returned to this masterpiece many times through my childhood and again in later years.

I've also long been an advocate of soup. Wonderful stuff. I have battled for years against a husband who likes Cup-a-Soup - which to my mind has all the nutritional value of over-salted wallpaper paste and is an abomination. But if he wants cup-a-soup, that's fine. I prefer not to pollute my body with such rubbish, and often make a cauldron full of soup at the weekend. Weekend lunch is generally soup and bread and cheese and things.

Today was a leek, cauliflower and potato soup day. It came out a delicate pale green colour (hence the Lewis Carroll quote) and was really rather good. Here's how I made it:

Into a large pan, melt 20g of butter and put 500g washed, trimmed and sliced leeks in. Stir the leeks around, keeping the pan partly covered so that they sweat rather than frizzle. While the leeks are sweating, peel and slice a couple of garlic cloves and add them to the pan, then fill up the kettle and then chop up a cauliflower (I used all of it except for a couple of the outside leaves which were a bit manky) and put that in too. Peel a couple of medium potatoes (about 250g), slice, and put them in as well, then add boiling water to not quite cover it all, crumble in a couple of vegetable Oxo cubes, and grind in some black pepper.
Let it simmer for about 20-25 mins until all is tender, then liquidise (I do like my hand blender which I can use in the pan to liquidise soup). Mix 50g skimmed milk powder with about 150ml water and add that as well, then check the seasoning.

Serve hot!