Skip to main content

Summer Soup



A few years ago my friend Laura made a chilled watermelon tomato soup for a picnic.  The unusual but delicious combination stuck in my head, and I recently decided to recreate it.  I looked up a few recipes on the internet but mostly proceeded by trial and error.  After much blending and pouring of pink slushy liquids, I came up with something quite tasty.  And very refreshing when the mercury is topping 100F day after day.




Chilled Watermelon Tomato Soup

1/4 of a largish watermelon
About 6 tomatoes (1 lb 4 oz or so), peeled
1/2 of a medium onion, or a shallot if one happens to be residing in your fridge
Handful of fresh parsley.  A bit of mint might be nice too.
Juice of one lime
1 tbsp of wine vinegar (I used white, but red seems to be generally specified)
Salt and pepper to taste








This amount pretty much filled my blender, which says it has a capacity of 1.5 litres or 6 cups.  That was 4 generous servings, or you could easily get 6 out of it, especially if serving it as a starter.

You probably know how reliable your blender is with large quantities; with mine it was definitely worth blending the watermelon first, then the tomatoes, onion and everything else.  Pour the watermelon slurry back in and give it a quick whiz to mix it all up.  This also has the advantage that you can adjust the sweetness, so add the watermelon gradually and taste as you go to see how you like it.

Finally, pour into summery glass bowls and garnish with crumbled feta cheese, olives, sprigs or mint or parsley.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus came to earth... to reflect God to us

Do you remember playing with a magnifying glass on a sunny day?   That curved piece of glass you held in your hand captured the scattered rays, narrowing them down to a fluttering patch of brightness.   And all the light’s power was held in that one small circle, shrinking and shrinking… until finally you were rewarded with a sudden curl of smoke, and a neat charred hole. Imagine, then, that God, seeking to reveal himself on earth, condensed his essential being through some kind of celestial magnifying glass.   That wavering point became smaller and smaller, losing none of its power… until it became the exact size of a human baby, growing in a womb. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, says the verse in Colossians, the perfect reflection of God’s glory.   This is the first and greatest reason that Jesus came: to show us what God is really like.   Yet sometimes, reflected and refracted through 2000 years of history, the image that Jesus shows...
2 comments
Read more

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cold snap

On Sunday afternoon at 5 pm it was 77°F; I went for a walk wearing shorts, T-shirt and sandals. On Monday morning at 8 am it was 27°F; I went for a walk wearing coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and boots. Living here certainly gives you a new appreciation of warm and cold fronts.
1 comment
Read more