I love soups. I never used to like soups. People always put celery in soups, and celery is one of those flavors that just makes me cringe. I don't really like stews either. You know what? I like broth. That's really it. I like broth. 

That being said, I had some amazing french onion soup at a restaurant a couple weeks ago and I couldn't get the broth out of my head. It reminded me of some of my favorite beef broth... so I had to try to make it myself. 

I found this recipe on the le creme de la crumb site which has given me oodles of inspiration for slow cooker food. I am not terribly fond of recipes that require me to do extra work before I put it in the slow cooker, but I know what happens when you put raw onions in soup... something just doesn't work. So, I did this (ingredients and directions are from the la creme de la crumb site)...

Ingredients:

• 4 yellow onions, skins removed and thinly sliced into rings
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic
• 8 cups beef broth
• 1 bay leaf
• 6 slices crusty french bread
• 8-12 slices of gruyere or swiss cheese

Directions:

1. Add butter and onion rings to the largest pan/skillet you have and saute over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes or until onions are translucent and start to brown. Cover and cook about 5 minutes longer to let them caramelize a little more.
2. Transfer onions to slow cooker. Add garlic, broth, and bay leaf. Cover and cook on high 3-4 hours or on low 6-8 hours (or up to 10).
3. About 20-30 minutes before serving, preheat oven to 420 degrees. Place slices of bread in a single layer on a baking sheet. Place in preheated oven for about 5 minutes, then flip the bread slices over and return to oven for another 5 minutes or so until bread is dried and crunchy. Set aside.
4. Place oven-safe bowls on the baking sheet. Fill each with soup from the slow cooker. Place 2 slices of swiss cheese (overlapping) on top of the soup so the edges are hanging over the sides of the bowls. Bake about 10 minutes until cheese is melty. Serve with crusty bread and garnish with parsley if desired.

Notes: 
I don't follow directions well. I didn't use the bay leaf (I'm not terribly fond of bay). I used way too much broth because I wanted to have enough liquid in the crock pot. 

Okay... so, I'm pretty sure the reason this is supposed to go into a crock pot is because the broth needs to heat, and it needs to fuse with the onions and become delicious to the extreme. The problem is that the broth I used is made at boiling temperature, so the slow cooker wasn't really necessary at all. If I had my own homemade broth, the slow cooker would have been amazing. 

The onions took forever to caramelize and caused some awesome burn marks on the side of my stainless steel pan. I should have used my cast iron. 


Review:
​The recipe was easy to follow, and the ingredients were easy to find. It is honestly just broth, bread, onions, and cheese. It's really hard to mess up, and it's really hard to not love it. Find a broth that you love and use that. 

I am pretty sure the soup lasted about 5 seconds. I inhaled it. I might be an animal. It was really good, but it was also pretty standard. 

Total Score:
4

Disclaimer: I'm about to use the words broth and stock interchangeably. I know there is a difference. For ease of communication, I use them both for the same thing. I'm pretty sure I already did a turkey-stock post... 

We got some chickens and ducks this last spring. We got 12 chickens and 4 ducks. Now only 5 chickens remain and our freezer is full. So, I decided to cook one of the chickens in the slow cooker. I put a smidgen of butter on the bottom of the crockpot, then I cut up an onion (store bought supplemented with home grown) and some garlic (homegrown). Then I seasoned the chicken with homegrown herbs and salt. Cooked it on low for 4 hours because it was a small bird. I didn't want to make a whole blog for slow cooker chicken. I may in the future, but this blog is for something else. This blog is for chicken stock/chicken bone broth. 

Ingredients:
Chicken carcass, fat, skin, any leftover chicken bits and drippings
Onion
Garlic
Salt 
Peppercorns
Carrots
Mushrooms
2 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar (leaches all the delicious and nutritious stuff out of the bones)
...Honestly, you can use whatever you want, but I don't recommend potatoes, leafy greens, dark green veggies etc... they get pretty bitter.  I personally am not terribly fond of carrots, so I only use a few, and then I overdo it on the mushrooms, because I love them. 

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker or stock pot.
Add water until your stock pot or crock pot is almost full.
Simmer for 1-2 days
Taste after 24 hours, if you want it stronger, cook it longer. 
When the stock is done, strain it into a container. Some people are concerned with the clarity of their stock. I am not one of those people. If you are one of those people... good luck. 

This particular picture is from the slow cooked chicken, so it had a lot of onion and seasonings in the slow cooker already. I just put the carcass back in after I cleaned it, and I put water on top of it. Easy as stock. 

Notes:
Go easy on the seasonings the first time, your stock may taste a little bland, but you can always add seasonings to it when you use it. It's really hard to recover from over seasoning something. You're looking for a good chicken flavor. 

Parsley is a great addition to chicken broth based dishes when you go to use your broth. I used to think it was useless, but it really amps up the flavor. 

You can use the carcass and veggies a second time for a weaker batch of stock to use instead of water for rice etc.

This is very important: don't let it cook too long without stirring... the floating bits can burn, and then your stock is almost unusable. Trust me on this. I lost 5 gallons of stock one day because of it. 

This is my favorite part of stock: I take all of my onion and garlic papers and cut ends and freeze them. If an onion is a little squishy and I don't want to cook with it, I put it in the freezer. When I go to make a batch of this delicious bone broth, I use all the papers and ends and everything that I had collected in the freezer. The papers add to the color and quality of the broth. Here's an example: TC will buy a bunch of carrots and then let them sit in the fridge. I don't care for carrots, but they're good to add in stock. So, when they start to lose their crispness and aren't as good for eating, I freeze them and use them for stock. Nothing goes to waste!