Just Soup and Salad

Sometimes when you don’t want to eat meat or pasta or fish or anything solid, soups come as a savior. And especially after indulging in food and pastries and cakes during Eid (Kurban Bayrami) and gaining more than we supposed to gain (I’m talking about me and the tummy!), we craved for a really green soup and more greens on the side!

So as always we opened our Jamie at Home and started with the Creamy Asparagus Soup (without the poached eggs this time but we definitely urge you to add the poached eggs, it twists the zest of the soup) which is very easy to prepare. We started with frying the chopped white onions, leeks and celery (please check the link below for the full list and recipe). About 10 minutes later we added the chopped asparagus stalks (the tips reserved for later use) and our organic vegetable stock to simmer for about 20 minutes with the lid on.

onions, leeks, celery and asparagus stalks

In the meantime we prepared the spinach salad with a pack of baby spinach leaves, some cubed bacon pan-fried for 5 minutes, goat cheese slices which are blended in one egg and some breadcrumbs to be fried (in vegetable oil), a handful of sliced mushrooms, a little bit of walnuts and our usual vinaigrette (with juice of half a big lemon, extra virgin olive oilof twice the amount of lemon juice, a couple of drops of balsamic, one teaspoon honey mustard, one teaspoon egg-free mayonnaise, chopped herbs of whatever we have, salt and pepper, one tablespoon water).

goat cheese-spinach salad

blending the soup

When the soup is simmered, we blended it with hand blender (we should have blended more!), seasoned it and put it back to heat with the asparagus tips for a few more minutes. We served the soups drizzled with a little bit of cream and with a slice of toasted country bread.

back to heat with asparagus tips

soup & salad

As our dear guest commented the meal was light yet fulfilling! I would prefer the soup to be a bit more liquidy and also the poached eggs would enhance the zest (as we’d done before). The goat cheese-spinach salad was just right to complete our mini dinner.

Creamy Asparagus Soup from Jamie Oliver