If you've been following our tips and wholesome dining suggestions, then you've likely made beef stock, either from slow cooking a roast, or from cooking and simmering soup bones. It's also likely that you have some of your home made grass fed beef stock frozen in your freezer. If you've been using our shopping checklists then you always have ingredients like onions, croutons, and Gruyere cheese on hand.

When you have all the ingredients French Onion Soup is a snap

• Heat stock to hearty warmth but not too hot
• Slice an onion thin and separate into rings
• Sauté onion in olive oil or butter (your choice) until caramelized
• Grate Gruyere cheese (I won't tell you an amount - it's whatever you like)
• Place oven-safe bowls in a shallow cake pan
• Place caramelized onions in the bottom of the bowls
• Fill bowls to ¾ full with heated stock
• Cover surface of stock with croutons
• Cover surface of croutons with grated Gruyere cheese
• Place under hot broiler until cheese is melted and browned (oven or toaster oven)

Serve hot

Enjoy with a robust Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon An option to this recipe is to add meat to the broth and make the soup a meal in itself, rather than an appetizer. While it looks like a lot of steps, they're all easy and don't take but a few minutes. It takes ten minutes to slice a cucumber and an onion. While the onions are cooking you can grate cheese, as you enjoy an appetizer of fresh cucumbers and dip with a glass of white wine. How hard is that? In next week's tip we'll make sure you always have croutons available if you have frozen, La Brea baguettes, as we recommended in tip of October 17, 2007.

After you get over the initial shock, just take a moment to think about a few things, and you will realize that even paying the price for grass fed beef and organic products, you can save money in your overall food budget.

When you live a wholesome dining lifestyle, you spend more on raw ingredients, but you don't spend your money on highly processed foods or eating out as much, and ultimately save money. (You can also save time, but we'll talk about convenience later).

A Wholesome Dining lifestyle does not include over-processed foods that provide empty calories at best. If you break down your food budget into cost / nutrient you will find that food items like chips, snack cakes, and pre-made foods with lots of bread or pasta contain very few good nutrients for the amount that they cost.

Look at the cereal isle of the grocery store. Some of those boxes cost four to five dollars, for less than a pound of grain, and most of it is full of sugar, if you're lucky, but usually high fructose corn syrup. For four to five dollars you can buy grass fed beef hamburger, and obtain far more health and nutritional support for your money.

Now compare our prices, ounce per ounce, with breaded and fried chicken nuggets or strips, whether frozen from the store, or served from fast food. Not only is it made from factory chicken, it's fried with God only knows what kind of oil, and there is probably high fructose corn syrup in the batter.

When you eat at home for the most part, and cook with hamburger, roasts, whole chickens, turkeys, and other high quality raw ingredients, you can afford the best with the savings from not eating out or eating highly processed foods.

Use your food budget wisely. Be willing to pay more for good wholesome food and stop buying processed, manufactured crap. You'll save money in the long run and be healthier for it.

Your steaks will thaw quickly if you just place them in a water-tight, zipper-lock, plastic bag, remove as much air from the bag as possible, and immerse them in cold water.

For premium, high quality meat, like our steaks, it is critical that you put them in cold water and absolutely never in warm water. Warm water will start the steaks cooking early, which will make them tougher and dry out faster. For fastest defrosting, place each steak in its own separate bag.

If the item you are defrosting wants to float, because there is no way to remove all of the air from the bag, then place a large pot full of cold water on top of them.

Defrost in original packaging if there's no styrofoam tray. Our Diamond F Brand grass fed beef comes in vacuum-sealed bags, and we encourage you to place the un-opened, vacuum-sealed steak directly in the zipper lock bag to defrost.

We find that Glad Freezer Bags keep a good, water-tight seal.