Asparagus soup.

Some vegetables I have a hard time to cook with diversity. Asparagus is one of them. I usually boil or roast them as a side dish or in a salad. But I also get easily bored of eating the same ingredient the same way all the time. I'm totally for diversity !

Asparagus remind me -and always will- of Christmas at my grandma's. She would cook a bouillon d'asperges as a starter. I used not to like it, because I used not to like asparagus. She always used to scoop out the asparagus to only serve me the broth. That I could deal with. Later, I would eat the whole thing and ask for more.

I was then on search for a comforting bouillon d'asperges online and came upon an asparagus soup instead. It looked so delicious I decided to give it a try.

Asparagus soup. Adapted from Ricardo Cuisine.

Ingredients:
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsp of Earth Balance
4 cups of asparagus, cut into 1 po pieces (keep a few uncut)
5 cups of vegetable broth
1 cup of rice (I used a mixture of wild and regular rice)
Salt and ground pepper to taste

Preparation:
1. Add Earth Balance over low-medium heat. Color the onion and add the asparagus -I threw in the ends first and then the tips of the asparagus. Cook for about a minute.
2. Add the vegetable broth and 3 tbsp of rice. Cover and cook until the asparagus are tender, for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the rest of the rice in a pot.
3. In a blender, blend the soup. Depending on your blender, sieve the soup to make sure you don't have any filamentous part of the asparagus.
4. In a bowl, serve one or two spoons of rice, cover with the soup and top with a couple of whole asparagus, salt and freshly ground pepper. Enjoy !

I simply loved it. It was tasty, sufficiently copious, and beautiful. I added the rice because I don't have a good blender -I use a Magic Bullet- and it didn't blend the rice so it was left in the sieve in the end. I was also worried it would not be plentiful enough. With the rice added, it was just perfect ! Completely different from my grandma's bouillon d'asperges but still a pleasure for my palate. I will definitely do that recipe again and again... and maybe cook it for my grandma !