Tales of woe/French Onion Soup

The last two months have passed in a whirl of weddings (not mine), holidays, watery sunlight, minor heartbreak, and lots of wine. I have been on some kind of self-imposed summer of madness, characterised by terrible decisions and huge amounts of fun. But now it’s the end of September, and I know it’s time to get serious because my housemate has developed an obsession with gardening (she sent me an email with a link to a website of seeds).

Having monumentally failed in our pre-summer plan of setting up a herb garden on the balcony, instead decorating it with the gritty, urban realism of a bath mat and a giant pot full of cigarette butts (update: now cleaned up), we are turning our attention to late planting vegetables. Turns out all you can plant in autumn is basically onions and garlic. Which will be great for French Onion Soup and minimising the risk of a vampire attack, respectively.

French Onion Soup is something I had never made before, despite liking it so much that I have the occasions when it’s Soup of the Day at Eat marked with a reminder in my Outlook calendar. In fact, for various reasons I still haven’t actually made it, but more of that later.

The weather has turned sufficiently cold for it to be acceptable to have people over for supper and serve them soup, so a date was set, and the night before that date I sat down with my beautiful Swiss knives and a glass of brandy and set to work on the onions. NB. This is an incredibly antisocial thing to do in any kind of shared accommodation, as not everyone can cope with 700g of chopped onions. Well, that’s why I told everyone I was crying, anyway.

My recipe was a mixture of Simon Hopkinson’s, Nigel Slater’s and Felicity Cloake’s ‘How to Make the Perfect…’ series in the Guardian. There are all sorts of variations in terms of what booze to use, what type of onion, blah blah blah, but the key point is the onions must stew for as long as possible, preferably over an hour, on a very low heat.

Duly stewed, I added the stock, brought it to boil and left it overnight, my plan being to casually reheat it (adding the bits and bobs that make it special -brandy, wine, different stock, gruyere croutons) that evening in front of my grateful guests, when it would be served with a big green salad and a cheeseboard in a vaguely alcoholic parody of the Good Life.

I think, with the benefit of hindsight, my main mistake was sending a text to all guests that said ‘Bring booze. No mixers’. I had assumed that clearly meant that I needed people to bring drinks, and that I didn’t have any mixers. Apparently not, given that everyone turned up with bottles of spirits and no mixers. I am actually sort of impressed that people think so much of me.

To cut a long story short, we drank it anyway. At some point the cheese came out, and was demolished. The pot of half finished soup stared at me balefully from the hob as I insisted on listening to INXS’s ‘New Sensation’ 15 times. The last thing I remember is realising that it may have only been 9:50pm but I was in urgent need of a party nap. This was invented by my friend, the Legal Robot, who has a habit of spontaneously falling asleep in the middle of parties, and waking up totally refreshed and rebooted 20 minutes later. Just once, for 10 minutes, I was going to follow his lead.

I don’t think you need me to elucidate on how I woke up 9 hours later, with two of my sisters in my bed (one of whom hadn’t even arrived by ‘naptime’) with whiskers and ‘I am a mouse’ written on my face.

I am pretty sure I will get over the incredible embarrassment of this event, and probably sooner than I should, but do you know what the worst part is?

Crazed with neat spirits and hunger, my guests took it upon themselves to heat up the soup. The half finished soup. And so, with the hostess asleep in the next room, they all ate bowls of lukewarm hot onion water. The End.

If it’s any consolation, it’s all going to be very serious from now on.