French Onion Delicious

Yes, it's true that Emmy and Cloud have buckets of homework and midterms and junk to do, but we are still hungry ladies. And sometimes hungry ladies, especially during cold Ottawa winters, crave French Onion Soup so badly, they don't even care that they don't own ovens. They persevere.

So Emmy ventured down into the foreboding mess known as the dorm kitchens, and caramelized a handful of onions. :

Looking at this photo, you might think "That foolish Emmy! There are things in that pan that I am certain are not onions! Can't she tell the difference between vegetables?"

As it turns out, she often can. This photo was taken after the vegetarian BROTH she also made was strained.

It was originally composed of homemade shiitake mushroom broth, rosemary, hot peppers, bok choy, and a dab of soya sauce.  

 Once it was nice and fragrant, she strained out all the delicious solids and put the hot pepper and bok choy in with her onions.
Then, the broth looked a bit like this:

Yeah, delicious and golden. 

Like a superwoman, she lugged all these treasures back upstairs, to where Cloud was waiting with cute little ramekins and her ILLEGAL toaster oven.

Yes, these hungry ladies are the reckless desperado types that use all sorts of hot machinery in their rooms.

We're rebels.

And we filled the little ramekins  with our caramelized onions, and ladled in some of our fantastic broth. Then, with a healthy layer of bread cubes and Parmesan cheese, we put them into the toaster oven and proceeded to make our hungry-lady hungry bellies very happy indeed.

 Though, if I could just point out, those little ramekins
were seriously like a half-cup or smaller. And Emmy and Cloud are women, not hamsters.
We wanted more!
Except that neither of us wanted to go back down to the icky kitchen to make more caramelized onions.
And we still had rather a lot of broth. (Scroll up and look at the picture of the broth again. That's a like a solid litre of broth for two girls!)
So Emmy grabbed her vermicelli, and we stuffed them in, covered them with broth and cheese, and toaster-ovened them, too.

Yeah.

Pretty fantastic.

The noodles inside the broth cooked, and the ones along the surface stayed a little crunch, and without the onions overwhelming everything, the delicately spicy flavour of the broth, with hint of mushroom and rosemary....

Augh, it's got me hungry all over again!