Serving the Soup

The mystery of who dropped off the onions is solved. An old friend who is a farmer here has a beautiful little five year old girl. She is entranced by my harps and is always agitating to get some time to try and play them. He left the onions as a thank you. He also told me about another reason the only market for them is local. Because of the high sugar content they do not store well. You can't just get a bag of them and stick them in cold storage to wait for your sales.

We get to keep all these beauties ourselves.

To serve you take a thick crockery bowl. It has to be a bowl that will survive being under the broiler. Fill the bowls 3/4 full with hot soup, lay your croutons over the top, then lay on a layer of grated cheese. I use about a half and half mixture of grated swiss, I love the nutty flavor and the texture, mixed with an equal amount of freshly grated Parmesian Reggiano.

This goes under the broiler until it looks like this:



Exquisite.

A couple of hints. If your croutons are extremely dry they will soak up all the delicious broth. No problem, if you see that this has happened when you remove the bowls from the broiler just lay another ladle of soup over the top. Don't forget to warn your guests about the very hot bowls. A thoughtful host will always include a sharp knife to cut through the croutons if the spoon can't get through the crusts, and also for trimming the strings of cheese from the spoon.

Our performance was the hit of the night. More about that later. Right now, soup's on and stuff.

BBB