French Onion Soup (A New to Me Slow Cooker Recipe)

It's spring, and that means IT'S VIDALIA ONION TIME - YAY!

And what do we do with those sweet, delicious, extra-special Vidalia onions from Georgia?

ONION SOUP!

French onion soup is one of my favorites (yes, I have so many), but in the past I've only eaten it in restaurants.  Caramelizing the onions takes some time and attention, and I know me in the kitchen - I'll try to multi-task and suddenly - burnt onions!  Not a nice thing to have stinking up the house.  So I have ignored the siren call of onion soup thus far.

Until last week, that is.

I was surfing the food porn sites and something caught my eye - SLOW COOKER French onion soup.  What the what???  Could such a thing really work?  I had to save that one for future reference.

Well I'm here to tell you oh-my-goodness it does!

On a foraging trip to the grocery I saw 5-pound bags of Vidalia onions,  I snagged one.  SCORE!  The very next day I got started.

I pulled out a knife, the cutting board, and the food processor.  Five pounds is a lot of onions to cry over, so I needed all the help I could get.  I peeled all those lovely globes of oniony goodness and cut them to fit the processor's feed tube, and away we went!  They filled the processor's 14-cup bowl twice.

Here they are, before cooking.
See how full the crock is?

All those onions nearly almost reached the limit of my 6 1/2-quart slow cooker.  After cooking several hours, they took up about half the space and I had beautiful, golden, caramelized onions.  With the rest of the ingredients added, it looked like, yes, like French onion soup!  Amazing. 

Here they are, after cooking.

*The original recipe directs you to ladle soup into ramekins, take a baguette of French bread, slice it up, and toast the slices in the oven or under the broiler, put two slices on top of the hot soup in each ramekin, cover with shredded Gruyere cheese, and then bake it in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes, then put it under the broiler for another 2 to 3 minutes.  Well, I didn't have a baguette, but I DID have some leftover hamburger buns.  I threw them into the toaster, put them, insides up, on top of the soup, covered them with cheese, and proceeded as directed.

It turned out REALLY well!  But I found out I didn't need to do the baking part first - going straight to the broiler worked better, in my opinion.  But maybe with a crusty baguette, it might be better to bake in the oven.  But I doubt it would make much difference.  I guess it depends on how much you want the bread to soak up the soup.

Oh!  The onions don't HAVE to be Vidalias - any generic big sweet yellow onions will do.  It's just that Vidalia onions are so freakin' AWESOME!

So here it is...


Slow Cooker French Onion Soup (10-12 servings)

5 lbs sweet yellow onions, peeled, quartered, and sliced
4 T butter, melted
1 T brown sugar
2 sprigs thyme (or 1/2 t dried thyme)
1 bay leaf
6 c beef broth
1/4 c flour
2 T balsamic vinegar (yes, it must be balsamic)
1 t black pepper
3 T brandy or red wine (optional)

Place the onions in the slow cooker.  Pour the butter all over the onions, as evenly as possible.  Sprinkle the brown sugar over all.  Place the thyme and bay leaf on top.  Cook on high 6-8 hours, until they are golden brown and soft.

Remove the bay leaf and thyme sprigs.  (I could only find one sprig; the other must have disintegrated into the soup!)  Whisk the flour into a cup of the broth, and add it and the remaining ingredients, except the brandy, to the slow cooker.  Cook on high 30 minutes, then add the brandy, if desired.

*Arrange an oven rack in the upper third of the oven and heat to 350 degrees.  Ladle soup into oven-safe ramekins and place on a rimmed baking sheet.  Top with toasted slices of a French bread baguette and shredded Gruyere (or Swiss) cheese, about 1/3 c per ramekin.  Bake 20-30 minutes, until cheese is completely melted, then broil 2-3 minutes until cheese is bubbling and slightly browned.  Remove from oven, let cool a few minutes, and serve.

Maple Glazed Salmon (A Sheet Pan Recipe)

When it was difficult to find chicken at the grocery store, I grabbed a couple of packages of wild-caught salmon.  I put them in the freezer until I could decide what to do with them.  That Girl had told me about a salmon sheet pan dinner, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd like to give it a try.

I'd never made a sheet pan dinner.  They got really popular a couple of years ago and there were sheet pan dinner recipes in magazines and on the internet, and people shared them like mad!  I never got into the craze then, but last week I was ready to take the plunge.

I started with oven roasted potatoes (click here for the recipe) on my sheet pan.  While they were cooking, I opened a package of frozen green beans and dumped them into the bowl I had used for tossing the potatoes in olive oil and seasonings.  I added a tablespoon of oil and some more salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

After the potatoes had been in the oven for 20 minutes, I took them out, turned on the broiler, shoved them to one side of the pan, dumped the beans on the other side of the pan, and put the salmon in the middle.  It all went under the broiler for 9 minutes.  Done!  Here's the recipe for the salmon itself.  You can substitute sweet potatoes, broccoli, carrots, or whatever you want for the potatoes and green beans, but you'll have to adjust the roasting time depending on what you're cooking.  Just make sure to put the salmon in at the point where there's about 10 minutes left of the typical roasting time.

If you want, you can cook the salmon alone and use other cooking methods for your sides.


Maple-Glazed Salmon (A Sheet Pan Recipe)

1 1/2 to 2 pounds salmon fillets (4-5 fillets)
1/4 c maple syrup
3 T Dijon or coarse-ground mustard (I had neither, so I used horseradish mustard instead)
1/2 t salt
1/4 t pepper

Take the fillets out of the package, rinse them, then dry them off with a paper towel.

Turn the broiler on high.  Mix the remaining ingredients together, place the fillets at least 1/2 inch apart in a sheet pan sprayed with non-stick spray, spread the glaze evenly over each fillet.

Broil 7-10 minutes about 4-5 inches from the broiler element.  The glaze will caramelize and the salmon will be pink and opaque and will flake easily with a fork.

Toys in the Kitchen - Part 3

Here it is!  This is the
8-quart model, and it is BIG.

Because I'm spending more time at home, I've been cooking more often, so I've gotten interested in alternative cooking methods and different kitchen gadgets and equipment.

After reading reviews and recipes and blogs, I finally took the leap and bought an Instant Pot.  I've only used it a VERY few times, so I'm still learning what it can do.  

Everyone raves about how easy and convenient the Instant Pot is.  I'm all about ease and convenience!  I'd tried ribs early on, using a recipe that used the Instant Pot for every step - searing the meat, browning onions, cooking the meat, then finishing it off with sauce.  The problem was you had to put the ribs in and out of the Instant Pot more than once.  To me, that's not convenient.  And what a mess!

Once again, I was rooting around in The Magic Box and came across three packages of ribs, frozen hard as stone.  It was the early afternoon, and I didn't want to deal with trying to thaw the meat, so, sort of remembering seeing something about cooking meat from the frozen state in the Instant Pot, I searched for "bbq frozen ribs in instant pot."  Voila!  Google to the rescue!

Quick and easy, and with the delay timer on the machine, I stacked the ribs in the Instant Pot at 2:00, pressed the button for the meat program, checked the cooking time, and set the delay for two hours.  We had delicious ribs at 6:00, and I spent the intervening time doing just about anything besides messing about in the kitchen!

So here's the procedure - I can hardly call it a recipe because there are only three ingredients other than the barbecue sauce!  So many recipes call for a spicy rub, but it really wasn't necessary, because the sauce I used was plenty spicy.


Instant Pot Barbecued Ribs

Ribs (your favorite kind), about 4 pounds (however many you can fit in your Instant Pot below the pressure cooking maximum fill line)
2 c chicken broth or apple juice
1/2 t Liquid Smoke (I used hickory)
Barbecue sauce of your choice (I used Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet 'n Spicy)

Set a silicone trivet or metal rack in the bottom of the inner pot so the meat doesn't sit in the liquid.  Add the broth or juice and Liquid Smoke.  Stack the ribs on the trivet up to the maximum fill line (or if they aren't frozen, you can curl them around the side of the inner pot in kind of a spiral). 

Close the lid, close the pressure valve.  Press either the meat program button or the pressure cook/manual button. make sure the pressure is set to high, the mode to more, and the time to 45 minutes.  It doesn't matter whether the meat is frozen or thawed; the cooking time remains the same.  It will just take longer for the temperature and pressure to reach the point where the cooking time will start if the meat is frozen.

When the cooking time is finished, either open the pressure valve after 20 minutes or just let it release naturally.

After the pop-up valve has dropped, open the Instant Pot, remove the ribs and place on a broiling pan that has been coated with non-stick spray.  Spoon barbecue sauce over each rib and spread it around a little to cover.  Place under the oven broiler with the top of the meat about 4 - 5 inches below the broiler and cook 4 - 5 minutes  If it starts to smoke, it's done! 

Take it out!  Serve it up!  Eat it up!!!