Do you like French Onion Soup?  The delicious onion flavor, the Swiss cheese, the French bread!  Mmmm!  So I decided to try an outdoors version with a few different twists and the result was delicious.

Since I was doing this mostly in a Dutch oven, I got some coals going first.

The next thing to do was making a foil packet of wood chips to put on the grill.  It's pretty easy--put a handful of wood chips in the center of a piece of foil, seal it all up and poke some holes in it.  Put it on a hot grill over the flames and let the chips start to smolder.

Once I had smoke I put some sirloin steaks on the grill to cook and get some flavor from the smoke.  I love the little extra flavor it gives.  Note: Don't do what I did and forget about them.  They weren't ruined, but thye were a lot more done that I would have liked.  Oh, well.

While the steaks are grilling, and with my coals ready, I got my Dutch oven heating up.  When it was warm, I added, slowly, two cans of French onion concentrated soup and 4 cups of water.  I let that start to simmer.

When the steaks were done, I took them off the grill and cut into chunks.  In my case, this also meant cutting away some of the overdone (or I could say burnt) parts.  Then into the soup in the Dutch oven they went.

Now it was time for something else to make this have extra outdoor flavor: grilled onions!  I sliced a onion into 1/2 - 3/4 inch slices.  To keep them from falling apart on the grill, I inserted three toothpicks in each onion slice, from outside in.  These helped keep the onion slices together.

I buttered the slices, then put on the grill to cook.  Checking them better than I checked my steaks, I turned over when the bottom had some nice grill marks, then removed when done.  They don't have to be cooked all the way, since they'll be put into the French onion broth and can finish there.

Into the French onion soup the onions went to finish cooking

I waited until the soup was at a slow boil, then removed a few of the coals.  I let the soup simmer for about 15 minutes, then started on the last item: Toasted French Bread topped with melted Swiss cheese!

I buttered two pieces of French bread, generously.  On to the grill and then turned the grill way down.  If you don't do that, I guarantee that you'll have burnt bread.  And you won't want that.

Once one side was toasted (check often), I flipped them over and topped with some Swiss cheese slices to melt while the other side got toasted .

If they don't quite melt all the way, no worries.  Just turn off the grill burner underneath the bread.  Leave the other burners going and let the cheese finish melting.  Looks fabulous!

When everything was done, I dished some soup with grilled onions and smoked beef into a bowl, and put a piece of the toasted French bread with melted Swiss cheese on top and tasted.  Delicous!