Paprika and Chickpea Soup (with Built-In Poached Quails Eggs)

Fact: I have made this soup before.

Fact: it is delicious.

Fact: this time I added quails eggs and it was amazing.

The beauty of this soup, as I was at great pains to point out in my last post about it, is its versatility. You can add whatever ingredients you happen to have knocking about the cupboards, or starting to go wrong in the fridge. This time, I added a chili that was getting wrinkly round the edges, swapped a normal onion for the recommended red onion and added some lemon juice from the lonely half lemon in the picture above. The resulting soup was very spicy, so I added a splash of creamy whole milk before I served it. This time, i really have shaken the habit of eating half a loaf with every bowl of soup, and had some tiny little oatcakes with it instead. It was aces.

Now, the reason that I’m reblogging about this recipe – which isn’t even one of my own – is that I had a culinary brainwave while I was making it. Last time I said that a poached egg on top sounded like a great addition. That was over a year ago, and I’d never revisited this recipe in order to try that out. This time I gave it a go – but I didn’t just add any old poached egg.

Oh no.

I added poached quails eggs. And I poached them RIGHT IN THE SOUP. I still feel like a braniac for having this idea.

A few minutes before I was ready to serve the soup, I cracked my eggs onto the surface. This is one of those soups that is almost thick enough to stand your spoon up in, so the egg initially rests almost on the surface.

After a minute, the egg had started to sink. ‘Hm,’ I thought. ‘We may have a situation here.’ I carefully lowered a spoon in under the egg – I could still see the top of the yolk – and lifted it upwards again. It seemed to be doing OK, the white hadn’t completely dispersed through the whole pot, so I let it go for another three minutes, watching and occasionally encouraging it back up to the surface.

The end result was something between a fried egg and a poached egg, flavoured by the soup and ready to carefully scoop out and garnish my dinner with.

I gently pushed the two poached eggs off to the side of the pot, and ladled out enough soup from the other side to fill a bowl. I added a splash of milk and swirled it through, then scooped the eggs from the pot and delicately laid them on top. The final touch was a scattering of spring onions, a late addition but one I was really glad of.

You now have two choices, if you’ve poached some eggs in your soup. You can burst the yolk and let it mingle with the rest of the soup:

Or you can scoop the egg up on your oatcake or other dipping implement and enjoy it in one mouthful:

I got to do both, since I had two eggs. It’s a win/win situation.