French Friday with Dorie: Warm-Weather Vegetable Pot-au-feu

For someone who doesn't eat a lot of eggs, I sure am liking this egg on a salad and now egg on a soup thing Dorie has going on. This week's French Friday with Dorie recipe is a warm-weather soup which actually ended up being a cool-weather soup as spring temperatures dipped back into the 60s this week. 

The recipe lists vegetables that could be used in this soup as a starting point, but Dorie encourages you to use seasonal vegetables that are available at the market. Since asparagus is at the peak of its season right now and available for 97 cents a pound I bought some and added them to the carrots that were simmering in the vegetable broth. I peeled them first because I really like them that way now that I made them in Dorie's Egg, Bacon, and Asparagus Salad. I also saw some English Sugar Peas while at the store and bought some and had a good time sitting out on the patio shelling them. I haven't shelled peas in a long time and it brought back memories of shelling peas, for it seemed like hours, on my grandma's porch during our summer visits to Pennsylvania. I had forgotten how much fun it is to see the perfect little peas emerge from their pods. They tasted so sweet and good raw that I had to stop myself from popping most of them into my mouth. 

I also added some baby shiitake mushrooms, and spinach and seasoned the soup with salt and white pepper and a bit of lemongrass from my garden. The stalk wasn't as big and pretty as the ones at the grocery store, but why pay $2.99 a stalk when I had some growing at home? The lemongrass added a subtle lemon flavor to the soup. I was a little heavy-handed with the white pepper, but it turned out okay since the baguette was perfect to sop up the broth and temper the pepper taste. 

By the time I finished making the soup it was getting a little late and I was also getting tired and frankly just wanted to photograph and be done with it, but that little nagging inner voice started to coax and push me to make the basil coulis and the poached egg. When I went to poach the egg and looked into the pantry, I remembered that I was out of white vinegar, so I grabbed the first vingear I could find which was red wine vinegar and it worked just fine. I am so glad that I made both the coulis and the poached egg because they made such a difference to the final taste of the soup. When I cut the egg with my soup spoon the egg yolk oozed out, making the broth turn even more golden. The yolk and egg white made the soup taste so rich and heightened the taste of the vegetables. The basil coulis elevated the soup to an even higher level, giving the soup fresh undertones of basil and olive oil.

You can find this recipe on pp. 378-79 in Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. 

Visit French Fridays with Dorie to see what the other FFwD members did with this soup.