A crazy onion soup post...

When I was in high school, my mom and I had the opportunity to take a road trip to Montreal. Oh, my god...what an experience. As a teenage girl, I instantly fell in love with this romantic city. Everyone spoke French, the stores and restaurants were charming, and the guys...well, the guys were to die for. Cute guys AND they spoke French! What more could a girl want??

I swore I was going to apply to McGill University just so I could live in Montreal.

Well, that never happened, but I'll always remember my first trip to the most romantic city in North America.

What brings all of this up is that I had a craving for onion soup the other day. I went to Jason's Deli and had a bowl. Lame. My very first bowl of French Onion Soup was in Montreal. I LOVED it. But nothing in the United States compared with the soup I had in Montreal...

...until they started serving it at little cafe in a department store in St. Louis back in the 1970s. Famous-Barr was a large department store that had several locations throughout the suburbs of St. Louis. I googled it and found this picture of the one in Clayton. Clayton is a very upscale area of St. Louis where Washington University is located. My mom and I used to shop here after my piano lessons. According to the internet search I did, it's currently being used as a storage space for Washington University.

This was the Famous-Barr located close to where I lived as a child. It's all boarded up now and in an area where you would not want to live.

Here's the downtown store. Look at all that architectural detail. This is a more recent picture and you can see the "Macy" signs on the side. Famous-Barr was eventually bought out by Macy.

My mom and I used to shop here. I think it had about 12 levels, and as you got to the higher levels, the escalators changed to these...

Does anyone remember those narrow wooden escalators?? I can still remember the rickety sound they made.

Another memory of the downtown department stores is the absolutely wonderful Christmas displays in the windows. I remember the crowds of people that would stand in front of the windows in the cold just mesmorized by all the activity. And I was one of them.

So all of these memories come about when I think of French Onion Soup. And here's what it takes to make it. This is the recipe used by Famous-Barr and it is the absolutely best version of this soup I've ever had. It is not a quick deal and takes two days to make. My oldest and youngest sons do not like onions, but they love this soup, so that has to say something. Here are the ingredients...

Saute the onions in a stick of butter for 1-1/2 hours...

Add the paprika, bay leaf and pepper...

Then add the broth and simmer for another two hours.

Then it has to sit in the refrigerator overnight. One bad thing about this recipe is that unless you've tasted the original soup, you won't know how much to season it. When I make it, I add salt and pepper until I get to the exact taste I remember way back when.

Toast the French bread and lay a couple pieces on top.

Then top with a fair amount of Swiss cheese and pop it under the broiler until the cheese melts and starts to turn brown. Then enjoy.

Old bridges...

I miss the old covered bridges that you used to see along the highways. I can still remember road trips when I was a kid...I always thought the bridges were the best part. Having grown up in St. Louis next to the Mississippi River, maybe I have more of an appreciation for them because we had to use them pretty often. They don't make them like this anymore, but then I'm sure there an logistical engineering-type reason for that. I don't care. I still think they look cooler than most new bridges. I've lived in New Braunfels for four years now, and I never knew this bridge existed...my son showed it to me one day. It's on a street that I've never been on because it's in a little neighborhood that I've never needed a reason to drive through. It's not used as a driving bridge anymore, but you can walk across it. It's all shiny and painted, so it doesn't really look that old...other than the ornate style which you don't see anymore.

It's over the Guadalupe River and this is what you see to the east...

And to the west...

Here's a railroad bridge in Selma, Texas. I think there's a tiny little creek that runs under this, but there was a "No Trespassing" sign on the road by it, and I've been told you don't want to disobey those signs in Texas.

I climbed up the hill to the tracks...and found an old railroad spike on the side as a souvenir for my efforts.

I like graffiti if it's done well. There are a LOT of trains that run through San Antonio and south Texas. I've never lived anywhere where I've had to stop for trains so much. So when I have to stop for one, I pass the time by watching for the graffiti on the cars. I think there's a real art to it and some of them are pretty imaginative. This one's okay.

I caught this one about a year ago in Kyle, Texas, which I like.

So now I'm getting off the track of bridges. When I drove to St. Louis a couple years ago, I came back via Route 66 which was a lot of fun. I started out in St. Louis at the Chain of Rocks Bridge. This was on the old Route 66 which crossed the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis. We went over that bridge many, many times when I was a kid because my dad did a lot of work in Illinois. The bridge was unusual, because it had a turn in the middle, which made it kind of dangerous. You can't drive across it anymore, but they made it a walking bridge for Route 66 nostalgia. My son and I walked out on it and we couldn't believe how narrow it was...hard to believe that trucks could get by each other. When I was a kid, we lived a couple miles away from this bridge. There was an old gas station where this picture was taken that was run by a guy who owned chickens. Childhood memories.

This was added for nostalgic purposes.

This is the Eads Bridge in downtown St. Louis which goes over to East St. Louis, Illinois...a city which should be on the bottom of your "Places I Want to Go Visit" list. The Gateway Arch is just behind me.

This is a bridge in St. Robert, Missouri, going towards the Ozarks.

Here's another railroad bridge in Hunter, Texas, which looks pretty much the same as the one in Selma. Selma's a pretty big suburban area north of San Antonio, but Hunter is one of those "blink and you'll miss it" kind of places. But I think those little towns are kind of neat, so I couldn't pass up some photo ops there.

This place is right next to the railroad tracks...your typical little small-town bar.

"Nowhere else but Riley's place." I'm thinking there might be a FEW other places than Riley's, but I'm not going to tell them that.

This is across the street from Riley's. Now, this place is obviously uninhabited now and is pretty much a "fixer-upper." But if you look close, you'll see there's a pretty new satellite dish on the right side of the porch overhang. Yeah, you might have to do a few things to fix this place up, but at least you have a nice satellite dish to start out with!

...which made me think of this place on Isla. Another "fixer-upper"...but this one is occupied!

But San Francisco has a few bridges which are okay.