Iced cucumber soup
Summer heat, 34 degree Celcius last more than a week, everybody is moaning. I like it. Even íf I work a lot these days. The whole city moves more slowly, the inner city is a bit more quiet and everybody seeks dark shadow.
The real challenge is what to eat these days if you have no chance to be allowed to fall in a deep after-lunch-sleep. Solely fruits and salad feels a little bit boring on the tongue after a while. And what your body needs is something salty. So I remembered an old, very simple summer recipe of my childhood: A cold cucumber soup. To cool down the soup more efficiently and tastefully, I made cucumber ice cubes which were served in the soup. Besides the cucumber soup I offered a good italien handmade ciabatta and a zucchini dip.
Cucumber soup + cucumber ice-cubes
Pale and rasp 3 normal big cucumbers. A half cucumber puree with salt and pepper, pure it in ice cube tray and put it into the freezer.
Cut an onion and a clove of garlic into very small pieces. Roast them gently in a pot with 4 teespoons of olive oil until the pieces are light brown. Add a huge amount of sea salt and szechuan pepper and the rasped cucumbers at the end. The best pepper to use in this dish is szechuan-pepper because this pepper has a very fresh taste with a lemon aspect that goes perfectly with the cucumber. Switch of the cooker. Add 2 bowls of natural yoghurt and one bowl of sourcream. Taste it and add 6 leaves of very fine cut basil and lemon pale before you put the soup into the fridge for 2 or 3 hours.
Zucchini summer dip
A very nice thing to accompany bread in summer is a
dip out of oliveoil, a bit of pureed zucchini, garlic, sea salt, medium crushed szechuan pepper, lemon and basil.
Cut a half little zucchini into small pieces. Pour a lot of fine olive oil over it. Add seasalt and crushed szechuan pepper, a bunch of basil leaves and a bit of lemon pale. Puree the whole ingredients until you get a viscous consistency. If it is too solid add a bit more olive oil. This dip goes perfectly with white bread in summer. And in this case it is a perfect addition to the cucumber soup because of its slight taste. I hope, as I do every summer again, that this summer lasts forever:-)
dolce vita ahoi • monika ebert • mobile minds
