If you're living in Portugal you must have noticed that the cold is finally here. It's not freezing cold but cold enough to kickstart the hearty soup season.

As I was flipping through Donna Hay's book, Seasons, this morning, a French onion soup caught my eye. It was simple, with few ingredients - meaning that I didn't even need to go to the supermarket. But the point of a French onion soup is the melted cheese bread on top, something that doesn't quite fit in my daily meals right now (I basically don't buy any kind of cheese these days, and noticed a lot of improvement on my skin due to that). So I decided to tweak it a bit by adding something hearty, as chickpeas, and keeping the bread simple.

I started with one big brown onion, peeled and chopped finely into slices. I stir fried it with a sprig of rosemary and a bay leaf in a bit on ghee and olive oil until soft and golden. Added half teaspoon of sea salt, two cups of vegetable stock I had previously made and one cup of cooked chickpeas. Let everything boil for a few minutes, enough to heat the chickpeas mostly. In the meantime, I sliced some buckwheat bread and toasted it. I then poured half of the soup into a soup plate, topped it with two slices of bread, a drizzle of olive oil and a teaspoon of chopped rosemary leaves. I'm planning to eat the other half for dinner.

Additional tips: if you like some "cheesy" flavour, you can sprinkle the soup with nutritional yeast. And for added nutrition, you can skip the salt and add a bit of white miso right before serving.