Poco Mountain Girl

Ladies and gentlemen, the soup of the day! Lettuce.

Lettuce?

Lettuce.

Hmn. But lettuce first get back to where it all started…

Our community garden is exploding with life and heavy with ripe veggies. When you walk through it, you feel like you have green-tinted glasses on.

Now that we’re back home from NM, I went down to check on our plot. Even in the short 3 days since the last time I was there, everything has changed so much. It has turned into a Garden of Eden.

I harvested 8 1/2 lbs. of ripe (or slightly overripe!) veggies from my plot this morning. Squash, radishes, kale, braising greens, and lettuce. So much lettuce.

Over the course of the day, I turned all the kale into kale chips, made the radishes into a jar of radish kimchi, and sauteed some of the squash with braising greens. All I had left was to figure out something to do with all that lettuce.

I had read about someone making lettuce soup, weird as that sounds. But you know me – I am not to be outdone in weird edible creations. I browsed around online for about 10 seconds and found this recipe:

Cream of Lettuce Soup

Serves 2

1 cup raw cashews, soaked for 1 hour

1 cup water

1 cup lettuce

1 scallion

1 teaspoon raw agave nectar

½ teaspoon nutmeg

Place ingredients in a high-speed blender until smooth and creamy. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with extra nutmeg.

I didn’t have any cashews on hand, but I did have some soaked and blended sunflower seeds. Instead of the scallion, I had a very small piece of red onion, and a bit of stevia in place of the agave. I did have lettuce, water, and nutmeg (yay!), so I figured 3 out of 6 ingredients was close enough.

I blended it all up, using way more lettuce than I was supposed to. It came out tasting like an appetizer from a fancy French restaurant. Okay, I’m just dreaming. But I really did like it – mostly because of its weirdness. It was an interesting mix of sweet and tangy (I had cultured the sunflower cream), and the nutmeg added another unique dimension to it. I also topped it with some chopped fresh tomatoes, which made it sing. I’ll definitely make it again soon.

Do you have a favorite summer soup?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2011 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Garden, Happy Healthy Hippie Food, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.