Thursday, August 5, 2010

Chilled cucumber soup with mint, dill, and yogurt

The farmers markets are full of cucumbers these days - big bins of knobbly dark green tubes, only surpassed by the enormous, baseball-bat-sized (seriously. like omg) zucchini. It's August. Late summer. My summer research project is due in about 2 weeks, but more importantly, cukes and zukes and tomatoes and stone fruit and berries will soon be gone, gone forever except for in mediocre incarnations in the produce section of Gin'Iggle. And by "forever" I mean next summer. But who knows where I will be next summer? Probably not here in Pittsburgh, with my beloved East Liberty farmers market.
Appropriately, the air is also full of a strange grey humidity -a stickiness that stops short of being truly hot. I expected this first week of August to be the most fierce in terms of heat, so I am grateful for the reprieve (no A/C in my third-floor walk-up). But the air is damp and heavy, and this is no time for stoves or ovens. Hence this soup - no heat is involved. You peel and chop some cukes, whirl them in the food processor with tangy yogurt and cool mint, refrigerate and eat. Refreshing and easy.
I mostly left this recipe as-is, since I can eat every ingredient and Shauna is a genius and her recipes rarely need tweaking. I adjusted the ratio of yogurt:cukes somewhat, upped the herbs because I always up the herbs, and played with a few other ingredients.
Chilled Cucumber Soup (barely adapted from Gluten-Free Girl)

3 cucumbers, peeled
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
1 1/2 teaspoons rice vinegar
16 ounces plain yogurt, preferably full-fat
1 tablespoon grapeseed oil
1/4 cup soda water/seltzer
salt and pepper to taste

Chop up your cucumbers into pieces of a size that your food processor can handle. Toss these pieces in the food processor with everything else except the soda water/seltzer and the salt and pepper. Whiz until smooth. Add the soda water/seltzer and stir, then add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour before eating (depends a lot on how cold your ingredients were to start with).

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