Onion soup

28-9-2010
Originally uploaded by cspatrick

Tuesday, September 28, 2010 Day 90
Today we walked the Peyrou, then went to a market which is immediately below the Peyrou underneath the aqueduct which terminates at the Peyrou. We bought beets, tomatoes, sweet onions, butter, and cheese – the latter items with an eye toward making onion soup from a recipe I found in a local magazine.
On the way back from the market, I snapped this photo of a street drain. Then we parted ways and Roger went on to the apartment with our purchases while I located a hair salon and made an appointment for a perm – scary thought, but I really need it. I usually get one every four months, and it has been only three, but the guy in Paris made short shrift of my perm by cutting off a great deal of it, and the top of my hair is getting entirely too long, so I have decided that it is time to get a perm. I located a salon and made an appointment for a perm at 2:00, then returned to the apartment for lunch and to start the soup.
The recipe called for 2.5 kilos of onions, which is about 5 pounds, and it serves eight, so we decided to cut it in half. It also calls for minced onions, but I haven’t the stamina to mince even two and a half pounds of onions by hand. I did start out chopping them pretty finely, but there is no proper large knife in this place, and of course, no food processor or other handy dandy appliance for chopping onions, so muscle power is all I have, so the farther I got into the onion-chopping process, the less finely I chopped. The halved recipe called for 50 grams of butter (half a stick) plus 12.5 cl (half a cup or so) of olive oil – that’s a lot of fat! And of course, I had to guess at the measurements because I have no measuring instruments here. As well, I had to make the conversions (well, Roger made the conversions), so the amounts are a little haphazard, but not too terribly off, I trust. I got all the onions chopped and sautéed them in the fat for a bit while Roger started the bouillon. Then it was time for me to go to my perm, so we turned off the heat on both and I left for the salon.
At the salon, the woman eyed my hair, asked if I colored it, and upon receiving a “no” response, discussed with me what I wanted in the way of a cut and we headed for the shampoo bowl. Here, unlike in Paris, I got a lather, rinse and repeat, and she massaged my scalp for a good long while, which I adored. I could have stayed there all day! Like the Paris hair stylist, however, she cut off more than I wanted, particularly in the back. By the time I leave France, it is going to be shorter than Roger’s in the back!!! The perm was pretty ordinary overall. I had lots of curls, which is what I wanted. She asked me if I wanted a “brushing” which is the equivalent of a blow-dry and style, and I said yes. So she blew it dry, which removed much of the curl from it, and feathered it a bit in front, and overall it looked pretty nice – not what I am accustomed to, but nice nevertheless. The surprise came when I asked her how much – it seems that the salon charges for individually for the shampoo, the perm, and the “brushing” and it came up to a bit more than I expected; fortunately I had my charge card on me and I whipped it out and paid.
From there I went to the English book store and picked up the book for the October AWG book club read, which is the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary And Schaffer and Annie Barrows. I dropped into the 2€ store and bought a measuring cup and a couple of large bowls for our onion soup, then headed home and picked up where I left off with the soup. The instructions called for me to sauté the onions, add flour and cook until I have a blonde roux. That didn’t seem long enough, as most of my experience (admittedly not a lot) has been that onion soup is quite red, not blonde. But I cooked the roux a good while and finally declared it blonde enough, and added the bouillon. This was supposed to cook for only 10 minutes, but while it was cooking, I consulted a couple of other recipes and decided that I would cook the broth mixture for a good half hour at least. In the meantime, Roger grated cheese and I made the croutons.
The soup was quite good. I guess it should have been, considering that each bowl had about three tablespoons of fat in it, and that doesn’t count the cheese! Actually, we undercut the cheese by a great deal. When I was buying the cheese at the market, I couldn’t recall how much cheese was called for in the recipe, and settled on 100 grams. It turns out that the suggested (full) amount was 500 grams, or more than a pound of cheese, so half that would have been 250 grams, or 8 ounces for four servings – 2 ounces apiece. More fat! Since I only had 100 grams, I still divided that by four, so the cheese content wasn’t what it might have been, but we didn’t miss it in the least. We ate it with a glass of wine apiece and a fresh baguette from our friends around the corner and it was a pretty substantial meal. Delicious too!