Beanie tried cooking French Onion soup in England.

 A few weeks ago, we had a go at making another soup - French Onion soup!!  The recipe we got said to get one kilo of onions, 50g of slightly salted butter, Gruyere Cheese, 2 teaspoons of plain flour and a thing called Ba-Get.  Apparently that's french for "French Bread".  See?  You learn stuff here!

Oh, and you also need Vegetable stock - we used another veggie Oxo cube in 1.2 litres of water.

 First of all, we have to peel all the onions and chop off the end bits.

 Then we had to chop up the onions into little bits.  I'm good at doing that, you know!!

 Then you take 50g of the butter and heat it up in a big saucepan.

 then you put in all the onions - you need to cook them until they do something called "Reduce down" to something like 20% of the size of when they're raw.  They need to go brown and go caramelised.

 Then we got another pan for the water and dissolved the oxo cube in it.

 We kept stirring the onions....

and stirred them some more.  They're going down a bit - that must be the reducing!  Not brown yet though.

 Whilst Andrea was stirring, I sliced up the Ba-get.  I'm good at speaking French you know.  I can ask for French Bread now!!  "Ooon Ba-Get See Voo Play" - see!!!

 Then I grated up some of the Gruyere cheese to melt on the Ba-Get later on.

 Still stirring and reducing.... this bit takes ages and we were getting hungry now.

 Oh!  That's sort of brown ish...!

 This is taking MONTHS!!!!

 At this point, we were so hungry we were practically eating the wooden stirring spoon - so we gave up caramellising the onions, and poured in the veggie stock!!  We added 2 teaspoons of flour and stirred that in and then added some salt and pepper.

 Then, we grilled two slices of the Ba-Get under the grill, turned them over and put some of the grated Gruyere Cheese on top and then melted it.

Then, we ladelled out some of the hot soup into one of our new soup bowls, and dunked in the two slices of toasted cheesey slices and ate it.  I think I like the Borscht soup we made - French Onion Soup takes forever to make.  Best off having it in a restaurant!!!