French Onion Soup (Vegan)

This morning, after the Nieuwjaarsduik, we invited some of our friends around for lunch. "We'll just have to pop past the supermarket and grab a few things," I said, "but you're welcome to come."

It was at this point that one of my friends kindly informed me that, here in The Netherlands, things are actually shut on public holidays. Who knew? In what I realise now is a heathen tradition, New Zealand shops are open on New Years' Day for normal business hours, so that if you don't know what to do with your hangover, you can bring it to a mall with thousands of screaming children.

The invitation was rescinded, and we made our way home alone, contemplating what we were going to eat, considering we had just been away for a week and had left our fridge pretty empty to avoid holiday mould syndrome.

Upon arrival, we discovered that we had pretty much just onions and yoghurt, but Mr N got to work patching together a French Onion Soup recipe from three different recipes he found online, each of which contained some, but not all, of the ingredients we had at our disposal. What a man.

French Onion SoupWould probably serve 4 if our stomachs hadn't been unnaturally expanded from Christmas overindulgence.

Ingredients

3 medium-sized normal onions (people seem to have weird different names around the world for types of onions - these are just your bog standard cooking onion)

1 red onion

1 clove of garlic (you could probably use more; that was just all we had)

2 tablespoons margarine

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 bay leaf

2 tablespoons flour

1 litre vegetable stock

1 teaspoon dijon mustard

1 teaspoon red wine vinegar (handy substitution for sherry vinegar, according to Google, but you need see it not as a substitute, as we did, but instead just a normal ingredient, since you didn't spend 20 minutes trying to piece together recipes that all called for sherry vinegar and then 10 minutes finding substitutes for said vinegar that you actually had in your cupboard)

1 teaspoon rice vinegar (we used sushi vinegar - not sure if it is the same things or not, but sushi recipes ask for rice wine vinegar, so I figure they must be from the same family)

About half a cup of white wine

Some bread, preferably "the good stuff"

Method

1. Cut the onions up into bits. (Mr N got bored halfway through so he cut them in a combination of chunks and diced - he says, "It depends on what texture you want, I guess.")

2. Cut the garlic into very small pieces. Or mince it, if you're a lucky bastard and you have a mincer.

3. Melt the 2 Tbsp margarine and 1 Tbsp oil in a saucepan over medium heat.

4. Add the onions, garlic and salt to the saucepan. Cook on medium heat for 4-5 minutes until the onions are translucent, stirring frequently.

5. Turn the heat down to low. Add the bay leaf and cover the saucepan. Leave the onions to caramelise (takes about an hour). Stir occasionally.

6. After the hour is up, add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir into the onions for two minutes.

7. Add the vinegars, wine, stock and mustard. Stir and bring to the boil. (By 'bring to the boil', I mean, 'leave with the lid on and go and check some music blogs on the internet and then shout "Bollocks!" as the pot boils over.' At least, this is what Mr N did and the soup was delicious, so I'm going to follow his instructions to the letter.)

8. Reduce the heat. Leave soup to simmer for 15 minutes. When there is 5 minutes to go, toast or grill some bread.

9. Season to taste and serve in bowls. Cut the bread into chunks and put them in the top of the soup. (See photo - apparently this is a standard way to serve French Onion Soup, though I have no idea what's wrong with the more traditional bread-by-the-plate method.)

By the way, since I've been so bad at updating this blog the last few months, for the new year I thought, "Why not start another blog as well? That's BOUND to make things better."

And thus it is: Vegan Three-Six-Five.

It's going to be about a possibly crazy mission to cook 365 different vegan recipes over the course of 2014. Since Mr N and I are not quite that amazing at creating recipes, they will be selected from a variety of locations. Original recipes will continue to be posted here.

Happy 2014!