Creamy Asparagus Soup and Roasted Veggies – A healthy dinner, topped with bacon and followed with a sugar rush for dessert!

Last week we had HUGE asparagus stalks in our CSA box.  I have never seen asparagus quite so massive.  With the chilly weather and a lack of creativity, I stole this recipe from Maeve for Asparagus soup and switched it up a bit to make a pretty quick weeknight dinner that lasted through two rounds of leftovers.  We had soup again on Sunday with our potato cakes leftover from the Passover/Easter dinner, and AGAIN on Monday with some egg salad sandwiches.  Yum!! It’s finally gone now, but it was definitely worth the minor effort I put into it 🙂

Maeve is amazing and made an asparagus based stock for her soup….I used veggie broth from a box. It was the middle of the week. Just deal with it :)  I also had a different set of vegetables on hand, and didn’t feel like going to the store, so the variety in the soup got switched up a bit as well.  This is where the stalks of our Red Swiss Chard (previously noted in the side-dish yuckiness from this past weekend) came into play.  I also bacon-ed  it up a bit because we had some bacon in the fridge that needed to be used up quickly.  This made the original dish AMAZING, but we had it without bacon both times we had leftovers and it was still mucho delicious.

• 1 Box Vegetable Stock
• 2 Tb Olive Oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 Bunch asparagus, tops reserved (we also had some leftover stalks frozen from our yummy asparagus side dish that we served with pan fried scallops a while ago)
• 2 small potatoes, diced
• 2 cloves crush garlic
• Stalks from 1 bunch of red swiss chard, chopped small
• Salt & Pepper
• 1/4 cup milk
• Bacon!

Heat olive oil in large stockpot. Sauté middle portions of asparagus stalks, chopped onion, potatoes, and garlic until a little brown. Add stock to cover and simmer until the veggies are nice and soft.  Puree (I used our wonderful stick blender!). Turn it on low heat and add  Simmer for 20 minutes covered until vegetables can be mashed with the back of a spoon. Puree soup until smooth. Return to a very low heat and add milk, asparagus tops, and chopped chard stalks.  Cook on low until the veggies are cooked through (the chard will take a little longer than the asparagus, so you may want to add the asparagus a few minutes after the chard).   While this was happening, we had chopped the bacon and then cooked slowly over medium-low heat to render out as much fat as possible, then cranked the heat to get it nice and crispy.   This went on top of the soup! Yum!

We also roasted some potatoes, red peppers, onions and garlic coated in olive oil to serve alongside.  When we were cleaning up after dinner, we threw the handful of leftover roasted veggies into the soup and it became a creamy asparagus vegetable soup for the rest of its yummy career. 

Thanks for the inspiration Maeve!!

Matt made dessert! We had a package of strawberries from our CSA and he grabbed some angel food cake and whipped cream at the store.  This was a complete sugar overload and so huge I couldn’t finish, but a satisfyingly sweet to end the evening.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Fun, interwebs, Leftovers, Life, Matthew, super-friends, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.