Martha Mondays: Hearty Onion Soup Gratin

I chose Hearty Onion Soup Gratin from Jan Living to get us back into Martha Mondays. It’s basically a French onion soup with turnips and carrots added in. I am a lover of French onion soup and have been making it a lot recently (I had one batch where I didn’t stir my onions enough and a tiny bit burned and turned the whole soup bad).

This recipe was fairly simple:
1/4 cup olive oil
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
2 tsp fresh thyme
salt and pepper
4 cups beef stock
4 small carrots, halved lengthwise
3 baby turnips, peeled and cut into wedges or chunks
4 small dried bay leaves
4 large slices of bread
8 slices Gruyere

Heat oil over medium heat in skillet. Cook onions until translucent, about 8 min. Reduce to low and add thyme and cook until golden 35-40 min. Season with salt and pepper

Preheat broiler. Bring stock to boil in pot. Add carrots and turnips and simmer until almost tender, about 5 min.

Divide vegetables among 4 bowls, add onions. Add bay leaf to each. Pour in stock. Place a slice of bread on each and 2 slices cheese. Broil until bubbly.

So now that you’ve seen Martha’s instructions I’ll confess what I did. First of all, I forgot the bay leaves entirely. I didn’t have enough fresh thyme so I used dried. I actually ended up roasting my veggies (and I used baby carrots cut into chunks) in the oven. I added the onions and veggies to the stock (I had about 6 cups of it) and let it simmer for a while so the flavors would combine. I like to make my bread separately on a roasting pan and if we’re eating at home alone, I cut my cheese covered bread into chunks before adding it to my soup to make it easier to eat!

With all that being said, I enjoyed this very much. Really, you’d have to really do something horrible to make me reject a bowl of French onion soup! I enjoyed having more veggies in it and have been eating leftovers for lunch.

Here’s the schedule moving forward for the coming weeks. If this doesn’t work for you, let me know. If you’d like to join up, let me know and I’ll add you.

1/17 Steak and Potatoes Kinda Gurl

1/24 Megan’s Cookin’

1/31 Sassy Suppers

2/7 Perfecting Pru

2/14 Tiny Skillet

2/21 Sweet Almond Tree

2/28 MarthaAndMe

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Odds and Ends

I’ve got a few Martha odds and ends to wrap up, so here goes.

Pumpkin Muffins

Pumpkin muffin batter

First of all, after I made the Pumpkin Swirl brownies (as reported in October), I had pumpkin left over. I decided I wanted to make some pumpkin muffins for weekend breakfasts. I did a recipe search on Martha’s site and only found one (called, surprisingly and creatively enough, “pumpkin muffins”). The recipe called for whole wheat flour and yogurt, so I was happy that it was somewhat healthy. It tasted healthy too – and not in a good way. They muffins were heavy and doughy. They had a heavy floury taste. I won’t be making those again.

You’ll see in the photo above that I use an ice cream scoop to scoop the

Muffins ready to eat

batter into the muffin tins – a trick I learned from Paula Deen. It has to be one of those sccops with the little windshield wiper that pushes it out of the scoop. It makes just the right size for a muffin. Martha  – that’s a good thing!

Butternut Pear Soup

In Cooking School segment #2, Martha and Sarah talked about making cream soups. I must say I found this confusing – cream soups that have no cream in them! I guess I always just thought of these as pureed soups. I often make a pureed carrot soup as well as a roasted butternut squash puree soup. Martha has a recipe for Butternut Pear Soup in the Cooking School book, so I decided to give it a go.

Onion and pear

The process is pretty simple. You cook onion and pear, add your roasted squash (she says roasting is optional, but I always roast mine first) and then add chicken stock. You puree it with your boat motor (this is what Emeril calls those hand held immersion blenders and I find it an apt description!). Seriously, this recipe

Roasted squash

has nothing else in it. No salt or pepper or herbs or spices of any kind. It tasted like baby food squash (which, I have to say, both of my kids adored the most out of all the jarred baby food veggies!). So I went to work doctoring this. First in went salt and pepper. Then some cumin. Then some ginger. I even added a dash of garlic salt. At the end, I poured in some leftover cream. By the time I did all this, it at least had some flavor. I served it with some homemade croutons and it was yummy.

Ready to be blended

Perfect for a cool night!

Blogging Martha

Here are some great posts about Martha from around the web. Got a

great one to add? Put it in a comment!

Martha Moments has great video up from BN.com where Martha talks about her first disastrous Thanksgiving. She also talks about her many cookbooks.

Mad about Martha is doing great interviews with MSLO employees. I also love the study

carrel craft.

Good Things has photos of new Martha craft items up