Winter will soon be here in full effect at the Northern hemisphere, especially here in Scandinavia. What better way to thaw from the subzero temperatures than with some good, hot food. Here’s an easy recipe for some damn good onion soup.

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The recipe makes for 4 people and suits vegetarians too. Here’s what you need:

6-8 yellow onions
ca. 100 g butter
2 teaspoons sugar
2 dl dry white wine
1 l vegetable stock (use bouillon cubes unless you make your own)
2 dried bay leaves
ca. 1 teaspoon dried thyme
ca. 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
4-5 dl grated cheese (something semi-soft/firm and aromatic: Gruy�re, Emmenthal, Edam, Gouda, etc.)
fresh white bread

The big idea is to make the basic soup, then scoop it to deep plates, put white bread slices over the plates and cover the whole thing with cheese. Then put the plates to oven for the cheese to melt. Consume with good red wine. It’s that simple!

If you know your way around the kitchen, you should be able to create some onion soup with these instructions.

For the rest, I’ve got more details and some pictures. Let’s start; first you need to peel and hack the onions.

Onion, meet knife. Knife, meet onion.

If you have some handy kitchen tools, now is the time to use them. I often use a mechanical vegetable chopper as my numero uno hacking tool while in the kitchen. It’s some kitchen apparatus from Tupperware.

In no time, you will have a lot of hacked onion.

Very good! At this point you can multi-task and start making the vegetable stock. The big idea is to crumble the bouillon to a suitable amount of water and heat it up. Read the package for more instructions. When the bouillon is ready, simply turn the heat off.

While the vegetable stock is heating up, you’ll start frying the onions with medium heat (for oven with knobs with 1..6, use 4; for oven with knobs with 1..12, use 8). Heat up the frying pan and melt the butter a bit. Pour in some hacked onion, add some sugar and fry it. Don’t let the onion burn! This means move it around every now and then.

It will take around 8 to 10 minutes until the onion is yellowish to golden brown.

Eventually the onion will look like yellowish, is a bit soft and tastes sort of sweet. When one batch is fried, pour it into a big pot. Do this until there’s no onion left.

At this point your vegetable stock is ready. Pour it into the big pot and mix well. Pour in the white wine also and mix well.

Next, add the spices: ground black pepper, thyme and bay leaves. Do not add salt yet.

Heat up the soup and let boil slowly for 15 minutes. Season with salt – taste it first.

Next, take some deep plates – these are the plates you will eat the onion soup out of. Make sure the plates can withstand heating in the oven!

Deal some onion soup into the plate. Place two slices of the white bread over the soup. Sprinkle with a lot of grated cheese until you don’t see the bread nor the soup.

Open up the red wine.

Place the plates into oven (275 degrees C) for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the cheese looks golden brown.

Make sure to have something under the plates when you place them to the table, as the plates are VERY hot. Don’t burn your finger, like I did…

That’s it, enjoy!