February 25, 2018 Brunch – Eggs, Steak, potatoes and onion Dinner – French onion soup

February 25, 2018 Brunch – Eggs, Steak, potatoes and onion  Dinner – French onion soup

At 9:00 we became hungry and decided to make brunch.  I diced 1 ½ baked potatoes, some of the PPI steak from the other night, and the sautéed onions.  Suzette then scrambled those ingredients with eggs.  I heated a flour tortilla and made an open faced burrito. Suzette ate her eggs without a tortilla.  Suzette made a Bloody Mary and I drank a glass of Clamato juice with the juice of ½ lime added.

•    Scrambled eggs with steak, onions, and potatoes on a heated flour tortilla drizzled with Cholula red                                          chili sauce 

After the news shows ended I went back to bed and slept until 12:30.

I got dressed and went to the kitchen and started making Onion Soup using Julia Child’s recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I sliced five onions into thin 1/3 slices vertically and then cut them in half horizontally, so they would fit in a soup spoon.

Meanwhile Suzette made the PPI steak bones and meat from one of the streaks into beef broth by simmering them in water, and chopped celery, carrots, salt and onion.

I had more than five cups of onion, so increased the recipe slightly.  I then sweated the slices in a covered enamel casserole for twenty minutes with 3 -4 T. of butter and 1+ T. of olive oil.

Then I added ½ tsp. of sugar.i did not add salt because Suzette salted the beef broth rather heavily, she said.

After another fifteen or twenty minutes  the onions had begun to brown, so I added 3 T. of flour instead of 3, which was a mistake because it produced a doughy flavor in the soup, which caused me to need to add additional wine and white vermouth and finally a bit of water to adjust the flavor and thickness.

Finally we added the four cups of broth and 1 cup of French Sauvignon Blanc white wine before any other adjustments. I then stripped all the meat left on the bones and diced the pieces of meat and added them to the soup so it was dotted with pieces of beef.

The moral to this cooking experience is, when cooking a Julia Child recipe, follow the recipe when in doubt or properly measure your ingredients.

                                                       The white wine I added
I  ate a quick bowl of soup with a drizzle of cognac and we left for the fermentation workshop at a new shop I had never been to before on 20th St. near the Natural History Museum and the new Chaco Hotel in a new building.

We watched two presentations, the basics for making cheese with milk and vinegar and making a shrub with sugared fruit which is then stabilized with an acid such as vinegar or lime or lemon.

                                               Milk curdling into cheese and whey after vinegar was added

We were given drinks of whey and a berry, lavender, lime shrub that were delicious.

The workshop was from 3:00 to 5:00 and afterward we went home and napped a bit more..

Willy came by for dinner at around 7:00 and I heated up the onion soup and opened a bottle of 2015  Red Valreas Cuvée Prestige Cotes Du Rhone Villages Appellation ($5.99 at Trader Joe’s) which was wonderful with the soup.  Rather than heating bowls of soup in the oven with cheese covered toasted bread croutons, I simply toasted slices of the lovely Bosque Bakery whole wheat bread and lay slices
of Jarlsberg cheese on them and melted the cheese in the microwave for 20 seconds and then lay the croutons on top of the heated soup after Willy ladled it into his soup bowl and did the same for myself.

We drizzled cognac into our individual bowls, so each person served themselves the perfect amount of soup and cognac.

The addition of cognac to flavor the soup at the end covers up any residual flour flavor with cognac flavor.  Those smart French.

Bon Appetit