French Onion Soup

I was reading Cook's magazine at a friends house and came across a recipe for French onion soup that I tried out today. I didn't have the magazine but I made a good try based on what I remembered.

The interesting thing is that I sort of messed up. I started with a little more than half an onion and one clove of garlic in butter and olive oil (I was only trying to make just one bowl of soup). I followed the spirit of the Cook's magazine article which was lots of deglazing but because I had so little onion in such a large pan meant that it carmelized too quickly. My inspiration was that as long as I threw out the onion after carmelizing it to death, it would provide lots of flavor. So I kept deglazing and perserving the broth that resulted. Eventually I just threw out a big mess of milk chocolate colored onion but I kept lots of broth that had grabbed the flavor while deglazing.

After a trip to Wholefoods I began again with a large yellow onion. This time I kept the heat a little lower but still deglazed as much as possible. Since there was more onion this time, I didn't cook the crap out of this onion like I did during the last attempt. Finally I threw all of the stuff into the pot - one can of chicken and one can of beef broth, one glass of champagne, some thyme, and of course some salt and pepper.

I let the soup boil off quite a bit and finally put the broth and about half of the onions into my soup bowl. I didn't have any gruyere nor french bread so I substituted a toasted piece of wonder bread over which I then melted some mozarella. That part wasn't that good however the soup was pretty darn tasty.