Five Onion Soup

I find that you guys have a lot of questions and I LOVE THAT but I really want to be able to answer them as best as possible so I added my email address on the sidebar. Send me an email with any questions you have about recipes or just send me an email if you want to say hi! I love your feedback and questions and I love to share some of the food knowledge I have amassed over the last several years! So with that said lets get to some food!

This cookbook came with the wonderful calphalon cast iron skillet my brother got me for Christmas.



Ingredients, I cut this recipe in half.


The steps. There was a lot of prep work with this recipe. If you have an auto chopper use it if you'd like. This is a lot of cutting and a lot of cutting into onions which is brutal on the eyes. A sharp knife cuts down on the amount of crying you will do, but its inevitable that if you have strong onions you will be tearing up a bit. I sure did! I did all of the chopping the night before so that when I got home from work the next day I could just get cooking.


I have never cooked with leeks. My sister uses them all of the time but I just never have. One word of warning, these are dirty little buggers, but so worth it. I had to buy a bunch of 3 and I only used one. But stay tuned, I will give you some more recipes in the next few days to use up those other two.


I wasn't sure how much green to cut off but that looked safe enough. I peeled one outer layer off.




I dumped them in a bowl of water and swished them around a few times. All the dirt and grit fell to the bottom of the bowl.


All clean and ready to chop.


action shot!


I chopped them pretty fine because I was not sure of how strong they would be.


I used 2 garlic cloves, I am sure you are surprised. I just ran them through the garlic press.


I used one large shallot.


If you haven't ever worked with a shallot you might be surprised to see that under the one outer skin there are actually smaller cloves.


Chopped him up.


I had half a yellow onion hanging out in the fridge so I got to use that up.


At this point I had to actually leave the room because my eyes were watering so bad.


gorgeous red onion. I love using colorful food.


all chopped up and ready to go! I threw everything in the fridge and had to listen to the SO remark about the intense onion smell every time he opened the door. It was very strong and at that got me wondering about how good this soup really was going to be!

Here we are the next day home from work. I grabbed the onions and got going.



I got some olive oil in my small dutch oven.


And tossed in all of those beautiful onions. Isn't it pretty!!


I set my timer for 18 minutes and stirred every 2-3. My sister confessed she doesn't actually read the steps of these recipes she just follows the photos and my text, so I will try to be better about telling you how long I did each step, etc.


The canned ingredients.


The Vino!


That is how it looked about halfway through. If the onions start to brown drop the heat. If they start to stick add a little bit more olive oil.


The herbs. If you don't have white pepper just use regular pepper. Also, please remember to salt this soup as you add your layers.


After 18 minutes they were soft and wonderful smelling.


In with the liquids all but the milk. I let this simmer for about 10 minutes.


This is how it looked after adding the milk. I let it cook with the milk for 5 minutes and then served it up.


This was absolutely delicious. It is great for a cold evening. I served it with a glass of the chardonnay I cooked it with. I am not a fan of Clos Du Bois but it was ok. The onions were mild and sweet and there was not even a hint of over powering onion flavor. I wish I had a nice hunk of crusty bread to serve this with.


Stay tuned for more recipes to use up the leftover leeks. If you want to know how awesome my breath smelled after I ate this don't forget to send me an email

diningaloneblog @ gmail.com