Asparagus Soup 2.0

By now, you must know that I tend to try and improvise certain recipes at times, and so do blog an updated version - be it a recipe or a picture - and generally append 2.0 to the name.  So this one falls under the same category, as there was one which I had blogged about in 2010.

Recipe:

Asparagus - About 1 pound, chopped

Onion - 1 small, chopped

Butter/Oil - 1 1/2 tablespoon

Salt - to taste

Black pepper - to taste, curshed

Vegetable Bullion - 1 [can use vegetable stock instead]

Water - 4 cups [If using vegetable stock, reduce it accordingly to keep the water/stock content to 5-6 cups]

Milk - 1 cup

Cream (optional) - 1-2 tablespoons

Lemon juice - to taste

• Chop asparagus. Heat butter/oil (I used butter) on medium heat. Add chopped onion.  Saute' for 3-4 minutes.  
• Add chopped asparagus, salt and curshed black pepper. May leave some asparagus on side for garnish. If doing so, boil the garnish portion of the asparagus with little water and salt in microwave.
• Boil 2 cups of water.  Add vegetable stock bullion, dissolve. If using vegetable stock, skip this step.
• Add the dissolved vegetable bullion/vegetable stock and the remaining water - to make it a total of 5 cups.
• Bring it to a boil and then turn down the heat to simmer.  Let it simmer for about 20 minutes.  Add milk (optional). At this point, if the soup is bit on the thinner side, you may adjust the consistency by adding a teaspoon of corn starch dissolved in cold water. if doing so, keep stirring the soup after you have added this.
• Cook for another 5 minutes. Turn off the heat.   Once it cools down, put it in a blender and puree it.  One very important step after this is to strain the soup.  Sometimes the fibre gets in the way and it's  a total turnoff fif you find out while consuming it. You want this soup to be as smooth as possible.  A rule of thumb - ALWAYS - strain this soup.
• Bring it back to the heat, add lemon juice (optional). heat it for 5 minutes, turn off the heat.
• Serve it in a bowl, drizzle with olive oil and/or cream, with a hint of freshly crushed black pepper, and the asparagus which you had saved for garnish (optional).

Enjoy!