Farm Box II: Potage Saint-Germain with Peagreens and Chives

When I was going through my farmbox this week, I missed something among the green piles of lettuce. There was a nice little bag of peagreens. I had been thinking about maybe cooking some of that lettuce. One person can only eat so much salad, and I have only one friend expected for dinner this week. Leaf lettuce, however fresh, can morph into a soggy monster pretty quick.

So I thought I'd make some of this lovely very simple soup, and try substituting the peagreens for part of the lettuce in hopes of making it taste even greener than usual. Also, as I had no leeks or fresh mint, I went with a combo of regular onions and the beautiful chives from the farmbox. I thought I'd use a little basil from my recently planted pot on the porch in place of the mint. For some reason, although they do not taste alike, mint and basil seem to sub for each other pretty well in alot of things.

1/4 stick unsalted butter
3/4 cup onions
3/4 cup chopped chives
2 cups chopped lettuce
2 cups chopped pea greens
3 cups vegetable broth (chicken broth is fine, too)
2 cups water
1 1/2 lbs frozen peas
some chopped basil
salt and pepper

Melt the better in a 5 qt dutch oven type pot. Add the onions and chives, and cook them very slowly, until they are soft, but don't brown them-stew them in the butter. Add lettuce, pea greens, broth and water. Bring to a boil, turn down and cook for maybe 5 minutes. Add peas and basil, salt and pepper, bring back to a boil, and cook until peas are just done. Turn off the heat and puree it up very smooth with your immersion blender.

If your immersion blender suddenly dies, and you do not have a regular blender, curse, strain your soup and puree the solid part in your food processor. Then put it back in the pan with the liquids and stir it up, and reheat. Of course, you could also accomplish this with your food mill, always assuming that you have not lost the little screw thing from the bottom and rendered it useless.

This is very good with plain little croutons of whole grain bread, toasted up with lots of butter. If you are going to serve this to guests, or take a photo of it, I suggest waiting to add the croutons until the last minute. If you do not, they will sink, and rather than looking brown and crisp, will have a suspicious, lumpy appearance . They will, however, taste just fine, even if you fish them out with a spoon and eat them separately, before taking a picture of your soup.

Comments

[maia]

I love your food writing and your daughter's!

[Lindy]

Thank you maia. (My daughter is the lovely and clever redfox of the hungry tiger. Clearly, I should have made this a link. Despite the best long-distance efforts of redfox, I am not managing to write html properly yet. Thus, anyone who does not already know her webblog will need to go to the link section of mine to find it. Do.)

[Steve]

For your future reference, typing <a href="http://www.stuttercut.org/hungry">the hungry tiger</a> generates a link. ("a" is short for "anchor", "href" is short for "hypertext reference", not that either of these explanations really will make them easier to remember.)

[Steve]

Or at least that's the way one should do it, but Typepad seems to have sensibly disabled the normal methods to prevent people from turning your lovely Toast into a billboard for casinos and mortgage refinancing.

[Ana]

Lovely soup. Good usage of lettuce.

I subscribed to a weekly organic farmbox for about 2 months. I ended up giving it up because, during the winter, most of their offerings were micro greens and mesclun mix. There is only so much of it I can eat and when I realize I was throwing away half of the contents of the box, I had to discontinue.