fast father-daughter food

This evening, Dad and I were left on our own for dinner, only instructed to use up the shrimp, eat some asparagus, and to finish the spinach. We noticed an open box of chicken broth in the fridge, and decided to make soup. We boiled the broth and added some spaghetti, then tossed in the shrimp, asparagus, and spinach as the pasta got close to done. We only used one pot for all our cooking, and the cooking process was fast and easy. The final result was tasty, but could have used a bit more seasoning.

Picture!

Boutiful Baskets & Asparagus Soup

They have a buying coop here called Bountiful Baskets where you pay $15 and you get a random assortment of fruits and veggies that fills up ~1 laundry basket. I decided to do it this week because we've been spending a ton of money on fruits and veggies (which is a good thing!). You place the order on Tuesday and then you pick up on Saturday. The place we pickup is about 3 miles from here and it's at 7AM. When you get there, they have rows of laundry baskets and you pick one laundry basket and load up all of the fruits and veggies. You don't get to pick what assortment you get and you can't trade between baskets. So if you see a basket that has a particularly fine set of bananas but icky looking strawberries you can't move the bananas to a basket that has lovely strawberries. You can have the strawberries or the bananas or you can pick a different basket. This is more of a problem if you do this in the winter because the quality isn't quite as good. This week, all the baskets looked good.
For $15 we got:
5 oranges
7 bananas
3 apples
3 tomatoes
2 mangos
a full seedless watermelon
a carton of strawberries
a bag of green beans
a head of romaine
2 bell peppers
2 zucchini
3 bunches of asparagus
I also ordered a mexican pack which had grey squash and assorted chili peppers and green onions and garlic and yellow onions and cilantro.


Now, when I ordered this on Tuesday, we were out of lettuce in the house and we had some clementines and a unripened cantaloupe. Then Thursday, Patrick's group had a picnic at work and we "won" the extra fruit bowl and a couple zucchini and yellow squash to bring home so we are currently up to our ears in produce.

The problem that we sometimes have is that I don't know what to do with some of the items. I'm not a huge fan of asparagus and I certainly won't eat 3 bunches before they go bad so I had to figure out something to do with them. I remembered that there is a maggi mix of asparagus soup that we occasionally had in Germany so I looked up a couple of recipes online for cream of asparagus soup and combined them to use only ingredients we had already.

Ingredient list:
3 bunches of asparagus (around 2.5 pounds)
2.5 cans of chicken broth
2.5 tbsp butter
1 large onion
5 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp flour
1 container of nonfat plain yogurt (I had greek yogurt so I used that)
some pepper (to taste)
~1 tsp salt (to taste)

I started out by asking Elizabeth to help me wash the asparagus. Alex helped. They both got very wet and had a wonderful time. Alex had to have his own chair so he could see what was going on.


Snap the asparagus into 1-2 inch pieces and simmer in chicken broth until tender. Move to a bowl and reserve some of the chicken broth that simmered the asparagus. Blend in batches until smooth.

In the pan used to simmer the asparagus, melt the butter and saute the onions and garlic until glassy. Then add the flour and saute for a couple minutes. Add in the reserved chicken broth slowly and cook for a while. Then put this in the blender and blend it up. Put the blended asparagus and onion mixture back in the pan and stir until warm again. Stir in the yogurt. To keep it from clumping too badly, I put the yogurt in a bowl and slowly thinned it out with soup until it would mix in smoothly. I think I put the salt and pepper in at the end.
One recipe suggested adding some fresh grated parmesan cheese at the end so I used some for garnish but it was too much and I would try something different for garnish next time.
I thought the soup was quite tasty and a good way to use the asparagus that lightens the flavor a bit. The rest of my family were not such big fans so next time, I will eat it all myself.

Any ideas for what to do with zucchini and squash?