Fridays with Béatrice: Fennel and green pea soup

Did I tell you about my new project Foodie Month? Well, I will soon - until then, you'll get short sneek peeks ... Part of this project is 'Fridays with Béatrice' (like I like to call it), a little cook-along with my fellow Foodie Lena from Coconut & Vanilla. We met (how else) at facebook and both love to read Béa's foodblog 'La Tartine Gourmande' - and of course we had to buy her book (as we both are addicted to cooking books).

We decided to cook randomly through our favourite recipes of the book and share our experiences - in the tradition of Tuesdays with Dorie.

Because this still should be fun and we both have a tight schedule we decided for two fridays a month we are going to share a recipe - not the recipe itself but a kind of recipe review. The pages of our copies are plastered with post-its, so this may take a while. I hope you'll like this kind of project and join us on this culinary journey. The choice of recipes made will also be based on seasonal availiable ingredients so there shouldn't be a problem to get all the things needed (aside from the environmental aspect of using local stuff instead of buying imported goods which had to be flewn in). 

The first recipe we chose was the fennel and green pea soup with shrimps and wasabi-flavoured whipped cream. It's not a really quick-made dish because of the extra components of the meal, but the soup itself is easy and tasty. The thing I was most suprised about was the color - a fresh green which really invites to eat. I've never cooked a soup before that hat that kind of appetizing color - mostly my soups tend to have a greyish shade ... The wasabi-whipped cream was a nice extra and had I nice color too because I used powder instead of wasabi paste - but it wouldn't have been necessary. The same applied to the shrimps, I guess some smoked fish would have worked too. My boyfriend (as my regular food critic) doesn't like fennel that much but he did like the soup.

Roundup:
Soup: fantastic and will be made again, ingredients I often use and like
Shrimps: unnecessary
wasabi-whipped cream: not really necessary, but may be used for another dish in future