day 15: vegetable pasta soup and french onion soup

Today was the first day of our second intro class. We made a vegetable pasta soup with onions, celery, carrots, turnip, squash, zuchinni, tomatoes and some fresh egg pasta. After finding just the right level of salt for Chef Pastore's food over the last three weeks (which is almost none), Chef Brown added a bunch of salt to my pasta vegetable soup when I presented my dish today. I've been so nervous about oversalting my dishes the last three weeks, I guess I forgot to trust my instincts. I sort of have the opposite problem with pepper, however. I'm a total pepper monkey at home, and I need to stop doing that in the kitchen. You can totally see the pepper in my bowl. In my defense though, I had to pour this back out my tupperware after I realized I'd forgotten to snap a picture...and not having my basil chiffonade garnish on top anymore, I went for what else? The pepper. Chef Brown did compliment my knife cuts though, and he said my vegetables and pasta were cooked beautifully. Two firsts today (well, probably more than that)...I'd never eaten turnips before in my life (eh), and I'd never made bowtie pasta (it's fun). You just pinch it. Oh, Chef Brown also noticed the amount of garlic in my dish. I'm not sure if that was a good or a bad thing. He just asked, "You like garlic, don't you?" Hell yes. Chef Pastore and Chef Shalchian always joked about how much garlic they both probably went through, being Italian and Armenian. Hmmm...I think I will test Chef Brown's garlic threshold again tomorrow. Chef Brown also said I had too much "stuff" and not enough "soup." I agree...that ratio up there just isn't exactly right.

So the real star of today was the french onion soup. Mmmm! Like the tomato sauce that we made a few weeks ago that made me take an oath to never buy Prego again, french onion soup was so ridiculously easy to make, and the results are infinitely better than anything you can buy pre-made in the supermarket. Seriously, you just need like, an onion! Okay, you might need a few other things. But it doesn't matter. You should never buy Prego, and you should never buy french onion soup from the freezer. Chef Brown's only critique of my french onion soup was that I hadn't picked out all the black bits of onion that had burned, but it wasn't so much that it was noticeable anyhow...only visible. I really did try to fish that burnt shit out as best I could. He said it was damn good french onion soup, and he did something I'd never seen Chef Pastore or Chef Shalchian do before. He had a second spoonful. And then a third. It felt great! I wasn't sure if I was getting my bowl back, but I did after that. And the soup is safely waiting in its tupperware for dinnertime tonight to go a second round in the oven with the croutons I toasted with some extra virgin olive oil, and the grated gruyere bubbling its brown goodness on top. Next time I make this, though, I think I will make a cartouche for the bowl, and then cut out the center, so it doesn't splatter so much. Or serve it in something without a rim. I think it would have been great to put it in a little ramekin with a sheet of puff pastry or something right over the rim of that so it's like a pot pie. Mmmm! Chef Brown said I did a good job with plating, but those splatters were bugging the hell out of me. He liked how I shingled the croutons...I didn't even realize I was doing it. I did think the parsley in the middle looked kind of sad. Next time, I will mince it and dust it on top. Tomorrow, we roast a chicken!