Spring Onion Soup

This week I've been out in my garden, assessing and revamping. I have a tentative appointment with our neighbors to go scoop and haul horse manure this weekend, and I'm trying to make room for as much of it as possible in my defunct garden beds.

Yesterday, I came to terms with the fact that my spring onions weren't going anywhere, and that their space should be one of the areas amended... so I pulled them all. To my surprise, half of them were rotting from the outside layers inward, and I discovered a new kind of slime mold (lucky me) while I was out there. I think I should stop calling it a 'garden' and start calling it a petri dish!

Anyho, I wasn't about to let these little baby onions go to waste, rotten layers or no, so I cleaned them up, peeled back all the mushiness, and came up with a plan...  

Spring Onion Soup

Makes about four appetizer-sized portions

1 lb spring onions, cleaned

1 quart good chicken stock or broth

4 TBS butter mashed with 2 TBS flour to form a paste

1 bay leaf

1/2 cup heavy cream

Place spring onions in pot and cover with stock or broth. Add bay leaf and simmer, uncovered, until onions are very soft and stock is reduced by half. Remove bay leaf and puree (be super careful, this hot stuff splatters and stuff!). Put puree back into pot and whisk in butter/flour paste. Turn heat back on to low and continue to whisk until soup thickens. Turn off heat again and slowly add in heavy cream. Whisk until incorporated, season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve right away! 

(If you want a thicker soup, make more butter/flour paste a tablespoon at a time and whisk in while heat is on until it's as thick as you like.)

I garnished with crispy fried onions, and that crunch was a nice texture in the creamy soup. However, I over-seasoned and my soup ended up being too salty (sad day), so go easy on the salt- because of the thickness of the soup, the salt dissolves more slowly (vs a brothy soup), thus it will grow saltier over time (d'oh). 

So the moral of this story? Learn from my mistakes: don't take shortcuts in building garden soil, and go easy on the salt!

Enjoy!