 Hey, this is Michelle Getzinger here with our Frustrated Foodie, and I have my very first guest on my show, this is my daughter Kylie, and we're going to make two of her favorite dishes for Christmas. One is French onion soup, and the other one is candy cranberries. So French onion soup is super simple. We're going to use some onions, and I went into my pantry today, and I've used up all of my vedalia, so I have four white onions and two red onions, yes four, I did the math right. I also have some green onions and regular vegetable stock, and what is in this lovely decanter here is some Merlot wine, and I'm going to show you what we're going to do with that as well. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to chop up all of the onions in nice little thin ringlets. So we're going to go ahead and get started. I'm going to give Kylie, and hopefully nobody gets injured today, and we're both going to start chopping up the onions. Now this is a super simple soup. We have it every year at Christmas Eve, and absolutely love it. This year we're going to make the vegan version of it. I'm going to show you how you can actually put on the crust of the French onion soup like they do in the restaurants, but I personally don't eat it like that, and neither does my family with the toast on the top and the melted mozzarella, but I'm going to show you how to do it properly. So we're going to go ahead and peel all of these onions. It doesn't matter how you do them, just as long as they're in like thin ringlets. Right? Like, wait, I'll take that. I'm trying to get the skin on point. Oh, you're really crying. I am. It's burning my eyes. You don't want to get my tears. We don't want to salt the soup with your tears. That's not hygienic. When you make this soup, you will leave the stinkiest stinkers. Okay? We're talking, yeah, I can. I've got to forewarn people. Like we're talking, like you remember those cartoons that you would watch, like Bugs Bunny and one of the characters would leave the stinker and like the flowers would wilt that's around the cartoon character? This is no joke, man. You give four people this soup. Like the next day after Christmas day, it's an extravaganza at the house. So this is the disclaimer for this soup is it'll make you have stinky farts. Okay? Okay. So not a plug for Cutco, but it is a plug for you to have a good knife. You don't have at least one good knife in your house, then you should just give up cooking altogether. You don't have to have a super expensive one, but a sharp one. All right. So we are going to take these beautiful crying machine onions and we're going to put them in the pot. Go ahead and turn on the stove. The remaining tears from my face. And get your olive oil. You want to coat the bottom of the pot. I know it seems like it's going to be a lot of olive oil, but again, we're just talking about onions, broth, and olive oil, and there's not a lot in the soup. So you're going to have to make sure you add some fat to it. Okay. Look at that. Look at that pot of onions. That's a nice deep pot. Okay. We are going to, before we, okay, I want to chop up. Okay. So before we continue any further on the soup, I'm going to save half for the garnishes on top because I like garnishes. And then we are going to cut these little guys up. The best way to cut these, you want to cut off, cut off their little hairy heads there. And then you're going to go ahead and cut that in half. So you've got them lined up like that. And then I stole your knife and you've got my knife. Cut them up nice and small. Because these won't cook down like the regular onions because the green, this green tender part here is fleshy like my finger. You want all the greens? Yeah. But dice them up. You want to have them nice and small. Be like, these little guys, you're not going to be able to eat them if they're not cut up right. Yeah. See how Kylie's got hers? That's how you want them. This is not one that you want to have a big rustic chop to. You want to almost have these so small that they kind of disappear into the soup. So I don't know if you can hear that, but that's a really nice little sizzle. You do not want them to burn. You just want them to kind of sweat and cook down. So my heat's a little bit too high. I want to have it on like a medium heat. Like I said, you want them to sweat. So the one way you get onions to sweat or vegetables to sweat, you've got to add some salt. So there's my pinch. That's how big my pinch is. Just kind of put it all over there and then I'll also put in some pepper. Now I was told that this black pepper is very spicy and I've been using a lot of it on my cooking at home. So just be careful when you're buying your black pepper, taste it out first. Some of them are more strong than others. And again, you just want to kind of give that a really nice toss. Look how pretty that looks. So basically this needs to sit like that probably for 10, 15 minutes until it reduces down. We'll come back and check on it. The next thing we're going to do is work on the cranberries. So I love to eat what is in season and seasonal foods right now are cranberries and pomegranates. So I'm trying to get them in any chance I get, but cranberries are kind of tough. They're very tart. They're hard. You're probably used to eating cranberries and Thanksgiving that comes out of this jelly-fied can that looks like a log. But there's so many other things that you can do with cranberries. So I looked up on Pinterest and I was trying to find a good recipe and I stumbled across this one a couple of years ago and my family absolutely loves it. It is like little sour patch kid candy crack almost. So when I made it this time, I didn't use regular simple syrup. So the first time I made it a couple of years ago I took white sugar and I reduced it down into simple syrup and then you take your bag of cranberries and you soak overnight the cranberries in just sugar water. It's like super simple. And the next day you take them out and that's what I did here. Take them out of your bag and then you just shake them in sugar. It's like the easiest recipe ever. But what I did so we can have the vegan version and I still have to watch that it's not too much sugar is I made one batch with honey and I made one batch with agave. And then to really spice things up I added honey and vanilla and then a little bit of lemon oil in the other. And then I don't have regular white powdered sugar so it's not going to be as pretty. But I'm going to try and show you one that looks like that and then I take the coconut sugar and we're going to just toss it in there. So I have essentially marinated these two bags of cranberries in the refrigerator last night. So I am ready to show you this magical dish. The easiest way to do it is kind of like shake and bake. You're going to take a Tupperware container. You just want to drain all the excess juice out of here. And this is the one with the lemon. I can smell it already. So we've had the cranberries have marinated. Go ahead and put them in here. This is the agave and lemon oil. When you're using essential oils, two things. Always spend the extra money to get the good oil. No joke. We're talking about this is something that you're ingesting. You want to make sure that it's high quality all around. I like the doTERRA ones and then I also have the vanilla. I'm going to go ahead and put that in there. Was that my two things? Did I tell you two things? Make sure you have. Oh, and don't use a lot. Oh, I got confused. So use good stuff and use a little bit. A little bit goes a long way. So here's our coconut sugar. I'm going to go ahead and pour that on there. You want to do the shaky, shaky. I'm going to get this out of the way. I'm just going to stir it around a little bit because it got stuck to the bottom a little. It's not as pretty as the white sugar, but it's a lot better for you. Actually, it don't look too bad. They don't look bad at all. It's just different than in the picture. And then are we ready to put them in here? Go ahead and we'll just put that half on there and then we're going to try and make some with the white sugar so you can see. We'll spread them out so they can dry out so they don't all stick together. Okay. Yeah. See, I'm not crazy about how this coconut sugar is clumping together. So we're going to go ahead. This is my first time using coconut sugar and I'm going to make the next one with just regular granulated sugar because I'm all about improvising here. I normally don't have a lot of white granulated sugar, but I love horses and I got sugar cubes. So we are going to go ahead and improvise here. I'm going to wind up my sugar cubes to show you so we can show you guys what the real version looks like. So we're all about using what you have in your pantry. There we go. Look how beautiful that is. Now that actually looks like snow. Go ahead and pour those babies in there. Oh, look how pretty. What a beautiful color red. I'm going to shake this over top of it and then Kylie can be shaky, shaky eggs and baking. I think that's good. I don't know if it's stuck to it or not. Let's see what they look like. I think they were a little bit too wet to really get that white dusting, but these need to dry though before you get yourself all excited about them and then when they do dry they're going to dry like beautiful shiny little nuggets of joy. Okay, so this one has the vanilla in it, going to make sure it's not poison. I like the refined sugar one better than the coconut one, of course, because that's the one I'm not supposed to eat, but if you want to really dress them up, get some of those sprinkles out that you're going to use to make your sugar cookies, put some shiny sprinkly stuff on top, and then poof, there you go. You got a wonderful, beautiful, healthy-ish little side to put out as candy, but it's really not candy. So we'll come back and take a look at that once they dry, and now we're going to move back over to the French onion soup and see how those onions are sweating. I wish you could smell that, it smells so good. See how nice and wilted they are, you got a little bit of caramelization over here. We need to wait probably another couple minutes, and then we're going to add the merlot to it. Now the merlot, when you're done using this, and it's all cooked out, there won't be any alcohol in it, but it's that base flavor of the merlot, or any red wine that's probably a pretty strong dry one, that's really good. You can even use a Marcello wine if you were in the cooking section, and you picked it up. But remember, when you're cooking with wine, if you don't want to drink it, don't cook with it. If it's crappy wine, don't cook with it. It makes a huge difference. So we're going to go ahead, and that will be our next one. We're going to use a little bit of wine to deglaze the pan and flavor those beautiful onions, and we're going to add the broth to it. So I was just talking to my camera guy, Justin, who makes the most amazing burgers, and we were talking about what makes a burger good, or food in general good. And I think that it is something I want to touch upon, and it has nothing really to do with what his recipe is for the burger, but it has to do with the actual recipe being dynamic. So anytime that you're cooking something, the more dynamic the recipe is, means the more layers of fat and flavor and spices really add to the meal and the flavor. That's kind of the reason why with the cranberries I added the lemon and the vanilla, because it adds a more dynamic flavor to it. We're going to do the same thing with our soup here. We're going to add the bread and the cheese on the top, which I can't have, but I want to kind of show you guys how you could have it. If I had my gluten-free bread here, I technically could pull it off with a vegan mozzarella cheese, but I don't necessarily need to do that. So how are we going to make the soup a little bit more dynamic, because we're limited on the fat that we can use, is we're going to take some olive oil and we're going to spread it over top of the bread. And then we're going to get a little bit of salt and pepper, Kiley's going to salt and pepper it. And then we're actually going to just stick it in the oven for a little bit, so it toasts up. And when the soup is done, I'm going to cut this in half, and I'm going to put it on top of the bowl. And then I'm going to add mozzarella cheese on top, and then we're going to bake the soup bowl with the bread and the mozzarella cheese in the oven. That's how you get that beautiful crusty look to it. So one of the things that makes Justin's burger so good, because that's kind of how I started off this conversation, is he uses multiple different cheeses. He uses multiple different spices in the meat. So the meat, by the time he's actually making the burger, is already very dynamic flavor-wise. So then he makes his hamburger, and then on top of that, you have the bread and then all the toppings that make it even more dynamic on top of it. So that's what you really want to look for when you're cooking, is just not throwing the vegetable stock in a pot or just throwing the meat together and frying it up for a hamburger. If you want a good hamburger, you're going to have to work it. You have to put some Worcestershire sauce in it, some spices, some different types of cheeses. It's all about building off of those small building blocks. And that's what I'm trying to teach you guys here in this cooking show, is we're taking very simple items and we're just going to build off of them. And you've got to make things up as you go, because a lot of times you don't have sugar in your pantry. Now I know you're thinking, when she's making a cooking show, she should have everything up front. But that's just not how life goes. And that's kind of how I want this cooking show to be, so you guys can see how you can wing it and make nice recipes and nice meals. So you can kind of see here how translucent the onions have become, and they're nice and soft. And we're getting a little bit of some burning at the bottom here, which is good, because that's what we're going to use the olive oil to do, is de-clase that. Those are all, that's not a mistake when that happens. When people think, oh, I burnt that. No, you're making little nice, yummy, crusty flavor bites when you do that. Now I'm not talking full out black, burn the bottom of the pot, but this kind of little bit is good. So I'm going to go ahead and grab the wine. We have it in this beautiful decanter this week. But again, I'm going to wing it, smell it, make sure it hasn't turned, which it hasn't. And we're going to go ahead and just kind of coat the bottom of it. You don't want to use, probably about eight ounce glass would be perfect. Drink a little bit, dump a little bit in, you know, you could do that too. Look at that, look how beautiful that is. And it's just going to slowly suck up all that flavor of them or low, and you're going to scrape the bottom of the pan. You can kind of see all the deglazing that's happening here. That's all that dynamic flavor that we've been talking about that's so important when you're cooking. By adding these small ingredients in here is what really is going to make the difference between a pot full of onions and water into a delicious gourmet soup. OK, let's roll in. So we're going to go ahead and the next step is, Kylie's going to finish cutting up the onions here. So we're going to grab another cutting board. I put my little crostini, see that's the other thing. It's just like those fancy glasses that I have. You know, I'm drinking kabocha out of a champagne flute. It makes me feel more fancy. When I take a piece of bread and I call it a crostini, that just kicks it up a notch, doesn't it? That's only a crostini if you put stuff on it and then toast it in the oven. But I'll go ahead and get out of your way. I always say, put a link to a video of how to cut the onions properly below and I'll do it. I think this knife is very straight and the cutting board's kind of warped, so it makes it really hard to chop. No, these ones can be a little bit larger because they are going to be a garnish on the top. OK, so we're improvising once again. I do not have good mozzarella, but I do have string cheese. So we're going to go ahead and I'm going to peel all the string cheese like this. It's going to make it work just fine, so don't worry about it. Grab your kid's string cheese and make some soup with it. All good. But it does work better when you do peel it. It's going to melt and it's going to bubble and be so delicious. I'm so excited that you get to eat this cheese. OK, so next step is we're basically ready to go to add the stock. I'm just using regular vegetable broth. You don't want to use the chicken kind or the protein kind or anything for this. You're going to want to use the most basic, blandest soup broth that you can get. I want you to take a look at the final. This is what it should look like before you put the broth in. They're almost dissolving. So I'm going to go ahead and slowly pour this in. Look at that. It even looks like a beef stock. This one's brown. Again, we're about six or seven onions. You can use any species of onions. It doesn't matter. I like to mix this species of onions up as best I can, because I like all the different flavors. If I'm really doing this for Christmas, I'll try and get every different type of onion that they have. And this is about, I'm going to add a little bit more stock to it, just because I want a little extra soup, because I love this soup. So about one and a half of these will be enough. This will be serving for four. Look at, and you can see the difference between this one. I don't know if you saw that, but look how clear this one is. What do we do next? We get our spoons and we taste. Okay, so go ahead and give yourself a taste there. You can really taste them. They're low in that. I'm going to try it too. That's good, but it needs a lot more flavor. Okay, so for this one, we're going to do a little sprinkle of salt and pepper. And then I'm going to grab my trusty rosemary, because I think rosemary really complements this. We're just going to do a little bit of it. And I'm going to put my sage leaf in there, my bay leaf in there. And we're going to bring it to a boil and then we're going to retest it again. Okay, so go ahead. You can start seasoning it. So she just added a little bit of garlic to it. Can't go wrong putting garlic on anything. I think we just need to have a little bit more of a dynamic flavor to it. Go ahead and put two bay leaves in there. Now bay leaves, again, they don't really have a whole lot of taste, but they help the soup get broken down. And then parsley flakes on top. Again, this is more for aesthetics. And I think aesthetics goes a long way. Did you put salt and pepper in it? Okay, so go ahead and give that a stir. We're going to go ahead and turn this on. We're about medium high right now. Don't forget about your stuff in the oven. Is that how it, that's how it burns. Look how pretty this crusty-ni is. It's nice and crusty. So when you, when you're doing the French onion soup, you want to make sure that you have containers that are going to be oven safe. This happens to be one of the oven safe ones. So we're going to fill it up and we're going to put the soup in it. And then we're going to put half of the crusty-ni on top and then the mozzarella cheese. And then we're going to go ahead and stick it in the oven. It's going to get all beautiful, bubbly and crusty. One of the things I like to do is I want to heat it up with some hot water and let it sit there. So there's not a huge shock when we put it into the oven. So my mom started this tradition. My mom's kind of, she's funny. She's the one who taught me how to cook and she would make this 12 course meal. It's probably really seven courses, but it felt like 12 courses and we would eat all day on Christmas. It was like such a spectacular event. I've never really been able to duplicate what my mom's done. And I've always kind of stopped trying, but she would start off with having like a munchie tray, like with little vegetables. And then she'd bring out, was it like a meat tray and then shrimp cocktail. And then we would have French onion soup and then she'd make everybody a Cornish hen. Before we had the Cornish hens though, she'd bring out sherbet, which cleans your palate so you're ready. I mean, like she put on this huge spectacle. And each time we had to sit down, there was new dishes to sit at at the table. And I mean, it was just a lot of fun. It was a lot of work. I don't know how she did it every year, but this is what I've taken along with me. I can hear it boiling if you wanna come take a look at it. Some assembly required. Try not to get the bay leaf when you're filling her up. Now she's filling it up. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change the setting in the oven while she is plating this to a broil setting, because we want it kind of all the heat to be down on the top of the mug. Kind of want it, wanna really fill it up, maybe even like a whole mozzarella stick or two on each one. You kind of want it to ooze over the side and bubble and be so crusty and delicious. Yeah. Oh, I see that the bread's sinking down in. Now it's important to make sure that you toast the bread first, like a crouton in the restaurants. Because if not, then it's just gonna fall apart and it's gonna be a big soggy hot mess. A little bit more mozzarella on the top. You can use all of that up if you want. No, that's fine. That's what we want. We want it to look beautiful. That's okay, don't even worry. It's hot liquid, hot, gooey, sticky mozzarella. I'm really hot. I don't know, is it good? Hey, thanks for watching. We just got finished with our French onion soup and our cranberries for our little special Christmas sides and I really appreciate you watching. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to put them below. Have a merry Christmas and we'll see you next time.