Making Cream of Spinach Soup

I have a row of fresh spinach growing in the garden.  It is beautiful and so far, with a cool snap, the bug pressure has been minimal.  Cool temps and a drizzle gave us a hankering to make a soup - Fresh Cream of Spinach soup, to be specific.  We used a recipe from a cook book we have by Jude Theriot called La Cuisine Cajun.  Let's take a walk out to the garden...

The recipe calls for a pound of fresh spinach.  I'm hoping I can snip off enough spinach leaves to make a pound, but I won't know unless I weigh them, right?  I'll bring the kitchen scale out to the garden.  I carefully snipped the biggest spinach leaves off, being careful not to damage the plant as the spinach will re-grow leaves and continue producing for us through the winter.  There we go - I harvested a pound of spinach:

Even though a rain had washed them, I brought them inside and filled the sink with water and let them soak in the sink.  For some reason, spinach has a propensity to hold little dirt particles.  I don't like eating grit, so I want to be sure I cleaned them up good.  I soaked and drained and then repeated, pulling out little pieces of grass.  Finally the job was done.

Here are the other ingredients:
3 cups chicken stock (we had just made fresh chicken stock from some chicken backbones and necks)
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup of chopped onion
1 1/2 tbsp minced celery
2 tbsp of AP flour
3 large egg yolks, slightly beaten (the hens made this contribution to our soup)
3/4 cup of heavy cream (the cows got to make a contribution, too!)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp Tabasco sauce
1/4 tsp of freshly ground black pepper
1/4 tsp white pepper

In a black skillet we melted butter and sauteed the onion and celery.  After five minutes, we added the flour and cooked for 2 more minutes.

At the same time this was going on, on a separate burner, we put the spinach in a pot and covered with water.  We brought the water to a boil.  Once boiling, we reduced heat to low and simmered for 15 minutes.  Then we added the chicken stock and simmered for 5 minutes.  Once 5 minutes passed, we removed from heat and allowed to cool.

We added the light roux (onions, celery and AP flour/butter) to the soup base and stirred it in.

We then used an immersion blender to blend all well at high speed.  This chops everything up real fine and you can start to see the soup come together.

We then put the soup back on the burner and bring to a boil.  It will thicken.  We beat the egg yolks and heavy cream together, adding some of the hot soup to the egg/cream mixture.  Reduce the soup to low and add the egg/cream mixture.

Add the salt, Tabasco sauce, black pepper and white pepper and stir all together.  Then get a bowl and get ready to eat!

Delicious!!  The neat thing about this soup is that you can substitute other vegetables to make the kind of soup you want.  For example: asparagus, carrots, squash, zucchini, broccoli...  This soup will serve us well over the winter.  It will warm you up, for sure!