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Since making Christine Moore's Green Soup once, I've made quite a few other dishes from Little Flower
. I have no idea what compelled me to buy Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe. I had never heard of the cafe nor its chef-owner. However this book found its way into my home, I ignored it for almost exactly three years. I remember flipping through it when it arrived, feeling underwhelmed, and forgetting all about it. As a result, it was one of the first cookbooks I thought I could quickly eliminate with this "judge a book by three recipes" approach. I was wrong. Little Flower is a tiny cookbook, but the recipes it contains are outstanding.
Christine's recipes have been almost uniformly delicious, but her cookbook is not without one flaw: a lack of precision. For her Green Soup, she calls for 1 bunch of kale, 2 onions, 5 cloves of garlic, 1 bunch of asparagus, 1 cup of arugula, etc... perhaps it does not really matter for most people, but I think it is important. What if you buy your asparagus at Costco - how would you know how much asparagus to use? Should the arugula be packed into the cup, or loosely placed in the cup? Does she mean a large yellow onion or a small white onion? I went to Whole Foods specifically to weigh out a bunch of kale and asparagus, so that I could have an approximate idea of the weights I was using. It turns out there is a website that will give these rough equivalents (cooksinfo.com), but I still would prefer the recipe to be more precise.
Once you know what amounts to be using, this soup is really easy to toss together on a weeknight. Even for me, the slowest person ever to chop vegetables. It's also forgiving, you can use frozen vegetables instead of fresh when asparagus disappears from the supermarket. Plus, if you make this and find yourself bored with it, pureed green soup makes a refreshingly different pasta sauce, and you could add some chickpeas or poached chicken for protein.
Original source: Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe
Ingredients
- 3 ounces (½ bunch) kale
- ½ tablespoon olive oil
- 1 medium yellow onion sliced
- 3 small cloves garlic minced
- 7 ounces (½ bunch) asparagus
- 2 cups vegetable stock I use Better than Bouillon brand
- 1.5 cups water
- ¾ cup fresh spinach leaves loosely packed
- ½ ounce (½ cup or ¼ bunch) arugula, loosely packed
- ½ pound (½ normal-sized package) frozen peas
- salt and white pepper to taste
Instructions
- Remove the tough center stalks of the kale (Little Flower recommends discarding, but you could also use these in a different dish).
- Tear kale leaves into pieces and wash well in cold water several times. Don't slouch about washing the kale, otherwise you'll wind up with gritty or "dirty" tasting soup.
- Heat the olive oil over medium-low heat in a large soup pot, saute onion for 5 minutes.
- Add garlic to the onion, saute another 5 minutes until soft (but not browned).
- Trim the woody ends from the asparagus, cut into 1-inch lengths.
- Add kale, asparagus, vegetable stock, & water. Bring to boil, then turn down heat to a simmer. Cook until vegetables are tender, about 5 minutes.
- Remove pot from heat and add spinach, arugula, and frozen peas.
- Puree soup until smooth, add salt and white pepper to taste (this is important, the right amount of salt makes a huge difference in the taste of this soup - I used about 1-2 teaspoons).
- Serve hot or cold, the soup is delicious either way.
Notes
[…] biscuits at every meal. Fried egg on mushroom biscuit breakfast sandwich? Yes. Green salad (or green soup) with mushroom biscuit for lunch? Yes. Braised chicken and greens with a biscuit? Also […]