Jamie All Week

I'm not very good at poaching eggs, don't hate.

For the most part, I have a pretty nondiscriminatory palate. I can eat and enjoy most things. But I’m embarrassed to say that I have qualms about soup. Soup has always been a hurdle. I would cringe whenever the school cafeteria decided to serve grilled cheese with a side of tomato soup. During those lunches, I would try to barter for bags of Flaming Hot Cheetos or tamarind candy. Dinners were just as dramatic. My grandmother, who claimed that her daikon soup would “cure” me of my brattiness and simultaneously stimulate my growth spurt, would scold me for rejecting her steaming hot saucepan of Asian vegetable-goulash. And if her blood wasn’t boiling enough, I’d open a can of Coke and call it “soup”. An angry tirade in Sichuanese would ensue.

Soup is always served too hot, or not hot enough; it lacks distinct flavors when the temperature is at either extremes. It’s like living in Manhattan. There are only a few occasions when the temperature is just right. And soup that comes silky smooth, as if it had been run through a sieve 5 or more times, loses its place in the “food” category. It becomes “beverage” or worse, “smoothie”.

My Jamie Oliver soup experience was kind of a fluke. I picked up scraggly-looking asparagus at the farmer’s market and wanted to find an easy recipe that called for asparagus. His Creamy Asparagus Soup with a Poached Egg on Toast came up, a sign that it was time to transform my aversion towards soup into something conducive to my learning.

So zuppa it was! Jamie’s recipe is easy and seemingly healthy. I started by cooking a mirepoix that consisted of leeks (left over from the fish dish), onions, and celery. Of course my house–and hair–smelled wonderful at this point. Every step that followed was straightforward and easy.

The only mishap happened when the blender, filled with hot soup mind you, exploded. I guess I didn’t really pay attention in my Physics class because hot liquid + blender = scary. My kitchen counter looked like lawn mower-vomit.

Though I’m not quite a changed woman, I do think that farm-fresh ingredients and plenty of good quality olive oil can heighten the quality of any soup. Maybe the painstaking process of blitzing the soup in a blender made me appreciate the finished product… I guess it’s kind of like dating. Yes, it's that other painstaking process that I'm still trying to figure out.