French Onion Soup

As promised, I am posted a recipe that I made not too long ago. And since it’s Autumn, which is Soup Season! I’ll be posting some soup recipes in the upcoming weeks. This season I vow to make and eat new soup recipes. I love trying new foods.

Here is my chicken noodle soup recipe, threeyellowdaisies.ca/2020/06/16/chicken-noodle-soup-4/

French Onion soup is a really easy recipe. What I like about making it, is a lot of ingredients are already on hand. I always have onions and spices it requires.

Ingredients
8-10 small onions, or 6 large ones
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
Salt and pepper
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 teaspoons of thyme
2 teaspoons of basil
2 teaspoons of parsley
2 teaspoons of oregano
2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce
6 beef bouillon cubes
12 cups of water
1 cup of Sherry (optional)
Bay Leaves
French baguette
Gruyere cheese, shredded

Directions
1. Slice the onions in circular shapes
2. In large pot, or in your crock pot bring to melt the butter
3. Once melted, add the onions. Make sure your onions caramelized, usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes to become a golden brown
4. If you like to cook this in a crock pot, now is the time to transfer everything into your crock pot
5. Once everything has transferred into your crock pot, you can start making the broth
6. By using the same pot you had used to caramelize your onions, you help deglaze your pot, ensuring you have all of the amazing flavours of the spices in your soup.
7. Bring the 12 cups of water to a boil
8. Add all of your spices
9. Once the water is boiled, add your beef bouillons
10. Once dissolved you can transfer the broth to the crock pot
11. You can allow this to cook on low for 8 to 12 hours, or on high for 5 hours, although this is the best soup to slow cook, so I always prefer to slow cook
12. When the soup is ready to be served, you can begin to shred some cheese to place on your baguette. I like to butter the baguette with garlic butter
13. If you have any ovenproof bowls, you can serve your soup in that, and place your baguette on top. Allow it to broil for 3-4 minutes.
14. If you don’t have any ovenproof bowls you can let the baguette broil on a baking sheet. Cut in portions to place on top of the soup.

Chopped onions

Onions with the spices

Final product of the soup.

My crock pot has a setting that lets me sautee and brown my ingredients, so I don’t necessarily have to use another pot to cook my meats, or sautee anything and then transfer everything over into my crock pot.

I am so happy because next time I make this again, I will be able to use my French Onion Soup Bowls that my mama gave me. I am so excited! 🙂

Chicken Noodle Soup

My roommate, who is my boyfriend’s friend asked me to make us chicken noodle soup, because he loves when I make it. And who doesn’t love chicken noodle soup?! My ingredients make about 10 servings, so you can increase or decrease your ingredients.

Ingredients

3 chicken breasts (or more depending on how many people there are), although you can make this with any type of chicken (thighs, leftover rotisserie chicken)

2 onions

6 carrots

6 potatoes

4 stalks of celery

Garlic

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 tsp Oregano

Basil leaves

Bay leaves

1 tsp Parsley

Chicken bouillon cubes and water or chicken broth

Rotini pasta noodles

Ingredients are ready to go!

Directions

1. Peel the carrots and potatoes
2. Wash and cut them. I cut my potatoes in eighths, and my Grandma taught me to slice carrots on angle, so the sugars stay in tact.
3. Thoroughly rinse your celery, and begin chopping into small pieces.
4. Begin dicing the onions. My tip is after you remove the outer skin, I like to run it under cold water before slicing it. I feel like that prevents your eyes from watering.
5. After that I begin cutting my chicken, although others may have their own methods of slicing and cooking the chicken.
6. I begin heating up my crock pot. When heated, I add olive oil and wait a few minutes to add the chicken. Once the oil is hot enough, I place the chicken in my crock pot. I then season it with salt and pepper.
7. When it is no longer pink, I add the onions and garlic.
8. Once the onions and garlic become fragrant, I add the celery. Be sure to move everything around after you added a new ingredient.
9. I begin adding in all of my spices (except for the bay leaves).
10. I add the potatoes and carrots, and let that cook for a few minutes
11. Add in the water. I use six cubes of chicken bouillon, so I have to add 12 cups of water. Once the water is boiling, I add the cubes.
12. Once the cubes dissolved, I give everything a final stir, before I add a handful of bay leaves.
13. I program my crock pot on low for eight hours (or you can even set it on low for five hours, if you are pressed for time), or on high for four hours.
14. After it has cooked for its programmed time, I add about 2 cups of noodles. I do my final taste test, to ensure the broth is just perfect. Now is the perfect time to make any adjustments. If you added too much salt, you can add a few drops of lemon juice, or a couple of squeezes of a lemon in the soup. Or if you feel like there isn’t enough spices, feel free to add more. The acidity of the lemon removes the salty taste. Cook on high for 30 minutes.
15. After the 30 minutes are up, it is ready to go.
16. Discard the bay leaves.
17. Serve with some dinner rolls or crackers, if desired.

Cooking up the chicken, celery, onions and garlic.

Carrots, potatoes and spices are added! Picture before the broth is prepped.

The final product after our first serving.

My scrumptious bowl of soup!

Ratatouille

Hi again! Today, my boyfriend and I made ratatouille. It is such a delicious meal. It is all vegetables so it’s also healthy for you as well.

Ratatouille is a stew that originated from Nice, France, and it is the perfect summer dish.

We normally make this in the oven, but today we made it in our crock pot. I will provide the instructions if you don’t have a crock pot below.

Ingredients

1 medium eggplant

2 zucchini

3 stalks of celery

3 bell peppers (yellow, orange and red), although you could add a green pepper if you like, but this is what I had on hand, at the time.

1 tomato

2 onions

Garlic

Pasta sauce, or diced tomatoes, your preference

Basil

Orageno

Parsley

Salt and pepper

Directions

1. Wash all of your vegetables.
2. Start chopping all of the vegetables.
3. My crock pot allows me to fry up my ingredients before I begin to slow cook my food. So I began to preheat my crock pot. If you don’t have a crock pot, a frying pan works fine, too.
4. Once preheated, I added the oil and wait for it to heat up, before I added the onions and celery.
5. Next, I began frying up the onions, once fragment, I added the garlic and celery.
6. Add about a teaspoon of each spice (basil, parsley, oregano, salt and pepper).
7. Once evenly coated, I add the eggplant, and allow that to fry up a bit.
8. After that I added the sauce and tomatoes or you can substitute for just diced tomato.
9. Finally I added the bell peppers.

Since I bought a huge eggplant, my boyfriend sliced them in quarters.

I diced the bell peppers.

My boyfriend sliced the tomatoes since they would shrink when they are cooking.

I thinly sliced up the zucchinis in slices.

My boyfriend diced up two onions.

I forgot to take a photo of the chopped up celery, but at least it is in this photo. The finished touches of dinner.

The crock pot settings I used are Brown to 15 minutes on low temperature. This is what I used to heat up the vegetables.

In here I added the olive oil, onions, garlic, celery, spices, eggplant, and the zucchinis. In that exact order.

This is what it looked like after adding the sauce, tomatoes and bell peppers.

Cover it for four hours on high or six hours on low.

The finished touch!

Bon appetite!

If you don’t have a crock pot, it’s a very similar process. Begin by preheating the oven to 350 degrees. You still cook your onions, garlic and celery in the frying pan. You can even heat up your sauce with the onions if you like. In a oven safe tray, coat the bottom of it with olive oil and a little sauce (enough to just cover the bottom of the tray). You can also get decorative about how you place each vegetable in the tray., totally up to you. I’ve always done a pattern. I would place it on the outside of the tray, and work my to the centre of the tray. Top off with the remaining sauce or diced tomatoes. Cover the dish with aluminium foil and cook for 45 minutes. Or you can cook it for 35 minutes, uncover and shred cheese on top and broil for 10 minutes, if desired.

Some recipes allow you to cook this in frying pan, if you prefer that instead. What I love about this recipe is the many options you can cook this dish. And you can add many different vegetables. Feel free to add your own pizzazz to this. It’s one of those dishes where you can express your creativity. It’s also a good dish to use up your vegetables if they are about to go bad.

It’s a tasty vegetarian dish, too or even one to have on Meatless Mondays.

I love having a baguette or some dinner rolls with this dish.

Beef Pasta

Earlier today my sister and I went to the grocery store and we kept on changing our minds from stir fry to pasta with beef or chicken.

After a long time pondering we decided to have beef pasta.

We bought the beef, peppers, onions and other things we needed.

I chopped the onions and peppers whilst my sister cooked the meat.

We added the peppers to the sauce. It was delicious.

 

Sharing a Meal

When my boyfriend was in the shower I gathered his lunch and I made us spaghetti before he left for work. He was surprised and happy. I also made us tea.

Later on the day when I came in from my grandparents my boyfriend’s brother invited me to have dinner with them. We had corn on the cob and tostitas.

Tostitas are fried tortillas from oil and we spread sour cream on top with onions.

My boyfriend made kale chips which is to replace potato chips.

Garlic Chicken Noodle Soup

Since I’ve been sick I have been adding more soups into my day as well as teas.

My boyfriend made it for me. I chopped the garlic and I found the oregano leaves and salt and pepper.

This soup contained noodles, chicken, carrots and onions.

It tasted even better than the day before I had soup because my boyfriend made it for me.

Shawarma Dinner

Today my boyfriend and I ordered a shawarma dinner. I always get chicken whereas he gets beef. I added more things to my dish!

I had my dinner with rice, chicken, green peppers, pickles, cucumbers, onions, garlic sauce with a bit of hot sauce. It was delicious!! 😀

Chicken Shawarma

My boyfriend’s brother was nice because he asked me if I had anything for dinner. I didn’t so he offered to buy me something. We had a chicken shawarma. It was divine! 🙂

It was made with lettuce, onions, pickles, cucumbers, chicken and this garlic sauce wrapped in a pita.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I was at my boyfriend’s and I made us soup. We did the grocery shopping together and then split the total; how cute are we? ❤

Anyway we got back from the grocery store and we started chopping up everything – the carrots, celery, potatoes, onions and the chicken.

Mind you we did a lot of things backwards since this is new to us.

We chop up all of our vegetables first. Then we sliced the chicken but whilst we were slicing the chicken we should have been cooking the vegetables – note to self.

We ended up cooking the chicken at the same time as the vegetables and noodles. Which isn’t something I shouldn’t have done.

We let the chicken cook with Olive Oil and then in another frying pan we added butter then waited for it to melt so we can add the potatoes, celery, carrots. I waited awhile to add the onions.

In a medium pot boil water and then add noodles and cook following cooking directions. When cooked, strain the noodles.

In a large pot we poured chicken broth and vegetable broth. We waited for that to boil and then we added everything to this pot and let it simmer.

Fortunately his mama, older brother and younger sister and her boyfriend were home and they got to have soup with us. We got a lot of reviews! Everyone loved it. 🙂 ❤

Tabbouleh

My mama bought chicken and I fried it up in a frying pan. I had this salad called Tabbouleh which is Arabian dish made by adding tomatoes, parsley, Bulgar, mint, lemon juice, olive oil onion and salt.

It’s quite delicious. 🙂

*Note this is not my photo.