I'm currently on a campaign to convince my boyfriend that soup can actually count as the entree of a meal. I mean, I'm a huge fan of three course meals, but sometimes soup is all I can manage. Now, this is a battle I tried to fight with my father, and lost, because he just couldn't accept that a bowl full of liquid could fill you up.
My current tactics are making soups that have lots of cream and butter in them, and then serving a huge bowl of roasted potatoes or a large loaf of homemade bread as a side. I don't think I've convinced him yet, but he's willing to suspend judgement for the time being.
Inspired by all the nice spring ingredients, I've made two really great soups recently, both from the epicurious.com website. One was a cream of garlic soup which used forty (really, forty!) cloves of garlic for four servings. But most of the garlic was roasted and it made for a fairly mild, flavorful soup. And last week I picked up spring onions and thin little asparagus spears at the market. I sauteed them up in butter, then added broth and pureed the whole thing. I mixed the juice and zest of one lime into a half a cup of sour cream, and served the soup with spoons of the lime cream in the middle. Yum.