Tea Room Recipe #17 - Elise's Tea Room (Long Beach, Calif.)

Spring seems to turn my tastebuds toward vegetables even more than usual, so this week I decided to try a tempting-sounding asparagus soup recipe.

The recipe itself was a delight to make largely because of the happy manner in which I received it! Not long after I began posting tea room recipes each Saturday this year, a surprise package turned up in my mailbox from tea friend Margie in California. Inside was this wonderful autographed book, "Afternoon Tea in Southern California" by Sherry Evans. Oh, to live in a state with as many marvelous tea rooms as California apparently has! This book includes photos and descriptions of the tea rooms featured, and in a brilliant move its author has also included a note page with each tea room so visitors can take the book with them and make notes on tea rooms visited. I treasure my copy from Margie, and it's the source of this week's recipe, with a few minor tweakings!

Creamy Asparagus Soup
Elise's Tea Room
Long Beach, Calif.

(Note: I halved the recipe so this is how I cooked it.)

1 large yellow onion, chopped
2 tablespoons margarine
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 cups chicken stock
1-1/2 pounds asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 large potato, peeled and cubed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper (or to taste)
1 cup evaporated skim milk (I couldn't find evaporated skim milk so used regular evaporated milk instead)
Croutons

In a soup pot, sauté the onion in the margarine over medium heat for about 5 minutes, just until transparent. Add flour and blend well. Whisk in chicken stock and make sure all the flour is dissolved. Add asparagus, potato, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then let simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Allow to cool for 10 minutes. Spoon mixture into food processor and puree in small batches, then strain off the asparagus fibers. (If you have a large strainer, you may use that to strain off the rough fibers from the asparagus; I do not have that large a strainer, so I found a colander with smaller holes that worked well.) Return strained soup to pot, add evaporated milk and cook on low heat to prevent the milk from scorching. Serve with croutons. The original recipe yields 15 (8-ounce) servings and is said to freeze well. I halved it and the DH and I ate it up in three days. So I can't tell you if mine would freeze well or not, but it was certainly a rich, satisfying, taste-of-spring soup!