Back in February, I decided to make my Recipe of the Month a salad rather than a soup, in spite of the wintry weather. This month, going in the opposite direction, I decided to do a soup, even though the daytime temperature is regularly peaking well above 90 degrees. I originally assumed that in this heat, a salad would be the obvious choice, but when I started searching through my cookbook shelf for an interesting salad recipe I hadn't tried, my eye fell upon the recipe for Chilled Honeydew Soup with Mint and Lime in Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, and I thought you could hardly find anything more cool and refreshing than that. So this is actually two firsts for the Recipe of the Month: the first cold soup, and the first fruit-based soup.
Making this soup may want to infrequently be much less complex. It has best 3 factors: an entire honeydew melon, which I became able to select up for $three on the close by farmers' market; 1 / four-cup of lime juice, which the recipe says should be freshly squeezed, however we made do with bottled; and tablespoons of minced mint leaves, which we harvested from our herb lawn in the the front backyard. The recipe additionally mentions using glowing blueberries as a garnish, however for the reason that they are optionally available, I decided now not to spend the extra $2 on the farmers' market. Then, all you need to do is chop the melon into chunks, unload it in the blender with the juice and mint, puree everything till it's miles clean (or as a minimum smoothish), and loosen up it thoroughly in the fridge. Brian organized the soup on Saturday morning, stuck it in the fridge on the equal time as we went out on a jaunt to Princeton to have a good time our anniversary, and it turned into all organized and watching for us at the same time as we were given home.
As I'd predicted, the soup changed into pretty cool, moderate, and refreshing. The flavor changed into a fairly even balance amongst sweet and tart, which made it appear a piece regular to be ingesting it out of a bowl; each the taste and the feel seemed greater like a slushie that must be drunk with a straw. In reality, I tried doing just that with some of the leftover soup these days, however it proved a bit too thick to eat that manner; I ended up having to characteristic some water to it, and it became though alternatively tough to slurp up via the straw. But Mollie Katzen does be aware that you could make this soup right right into a granita through pouring it right into a shallow dish and freezing it, with a stir each half of hour or so that you can preserve it from becoming a stable block of ice. Consuming it that manner, out of a sherbet glass, would possibly feel like a better in shape for the combination of flavors. But of route, then it couldn't rely as a Soup of the Month.
Next month, it'll probably be decrease back to salads. Perhaps some thing with tomatoes, for the reason that I each wish and accept as authentic with we are going to have a sufficient crop.
