French Onion Disaster

I've tried a lot of new recipes over the past year. I would say that 75% of them were home runs, 24% Mark suggested we NOT put on the rotation, but we ate it that one time. And then there's the 1%, French Onion soup.

I haven't been so good about cooking much lately (other than quick/easy type meals that come in a box), but given our budget constraints and tiring of the same type of things, I decided to branch out. I picked about 5 new recipes. One of them was a French Onion soup recipe from a new crockpot cookbook I got from Powell's a while ago. Honestly, I should have looked at the book more closely before I purchased it because I'm not sure I've used anything out of there yet. They are a bit impractical for our life. Any crockpot meal that only requires 7 or less hours of cooking, doesn't work for our schedule. I use the crockpot because I'm not home for long periods of time.

Being in the mood for soup and finding a recipe that let you cook for 8-10 hours, I thought it would work. Not so much! I'm pretty sure I followed the recipe and instructions to the letter, but unless cooking it one hour longer than recommended ruined the entire thing, it was the worst excuse for French Onion soup I could imagine!! The only redeeming part was the bread and cheese, which we used to make grilled cheese sandwiches when the the soup proved inedible!

Now my house (and coat) smell like stinky onions. And it's not a regular onion smell, I love onions, we decided it smelled more like fermented onions. Yuck!!! I didn't even know a small like that existed!

Does anyone have a good french onion soup recipe that's quick/easy??