I didn’t fall into a well or anything, but it’s finals week around here and I’ve been pretty sick with an ear infection. I could probably handle one or the other, but the combination rendered me pretty worthless for a few days. But I’m back and medicated and taking my last final in a couple of hours, so all is well!
A Quartet of Awesome: butter, onions, asparagus, and garlic.
I finally got tired of eating Thanksgiving leftovers and wanted something a little lighter than dressing, mac and cheese, and pie (this could also have a lot to do with the fact that we’ve run out of vegetarian stuff so all that’s left is meaty treats). To complicate matters a bit, we haven’t been grocery shopping in a really long time. I picked up some asparagus on a whim recently because it was too beautiful to pass up, but other than that we’re down to potatoes, carrots, onions, and not much else. I decided to make Asparagus and Potato soup, but I couldn’t find a recipe I liked. Although my past attempts to “just whip something up” often end in tasteless failure, I decided to try my hand at adapting a recipe for Asparagus Soup from The Complete Encyclopedia of Vegetables and Vegetarian Cooking, a cookbook given to me by my grandmother a long time ago.
Maybe I should've used a smaller pot?
To make this tasty soup, you’ll need:
- 1 lb asparagus, chopped
- 1 medium onion
- 2 cloves of garlic, diced
- 2 T butter
- 1 T all purpose flour
- 2 large or 4 small potatoes, peeled and diced
- 1 T lemon juice
- 4 C vegetable stock
- immersion blender or blender
In a soup pot, cook the onions and garlic in the butter until the onions are translucent. Add the asparagus and cook over low heat for about a minute. Add the flour and cook for another minute, making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan so it doesn’t burn. Add the stock, lemon juice, and potatoes and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are done. Remove from heat. At this point it’s easiest to just stick your immersion blender in the pot and let it go until it’s at the consistency you like. Mine was somewhere between creamy and kind of chunky. If you don’t have an immersion blender, you can transfer the soup to a regular blender or food processor and smooth it out that way. I feel like some garlicky croutons would be a nice topping for this soup, but I didn’t have any so I just did freshly ground black pepper, which was also good.
I'm not going to lie, this soup was rad.
