Soup #18/ Chilled Watermelon Mint Soup

It's been feeling a lot like summer around here lately, which can make the thought of soup pretty...well...not like something you'd want to be eating or making when it's 90 degrees outside. And while I've been having a hard time keeping up, the weather hasn't changed the fact that we love soup. It just changes the game up a little bit. So with that, here's our first official summer soup. 

What you need:

• About 9 cups of red seedless watermelon
• 2 tablespoons of fresh chopped mint
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 cup of a light, sweet wine like a Reisling or a Moscato (we used a bubbly Moscato and it was yummy!)
• 1 tsp chopped ginger
• about 1 cup crumbled feta cheese

How to make it:

Remove about 1 cup of watermelon from the rest and place it in a medium size bowl. Mix in your sugar and fresh mint and give it a stir. Now set it aside. Add the remaining 8 cups of watermelon, lemon juice, wine, and ginger into the blender and blend it until smooth. If your blender is on the smaller side (like ours), it's probably better to do this in two batches. We stuffed our blender full and then because of the bubbly Moscato, it got a little bit all over the place. However you do it, blend until smooth. 

Let this blend sit for a half hour. Strain your soup and divide into bowls. Take your watermelon-sugar-mint bowl that you set aside and scoop equal amounts into each bowl. Top with a spoon of feta cheese and enjoy!

The Verdict: 

Success! It definitely was different. This is the first soup that wasn't cooked in anyway. I also skipped the "strain soup" detail in the recipe and so there was just a massive essence of pureed watermelon. But it was a super hot day, and it was so refreshing to have that yummy watermelon taste.  This is definitely a soup that can be substituted for a whole meal, maybe as an appetizer, but really, it was good as a mid afternoon snack.  Another plus: I discovered that watermelon and mint is an absolutely amazingly delicious combination, and now that I have my own mint plant, I think I might be eating this more often! 

What We'd Do Differently:

Well, clearly, straining it would be a first. I'd also add a bit more ginger, I really couldn't taste it at all. I also loved the watermelon mint sugar mixture, and think that some of that (or more sugar/mint) could have been added to the blended mix. The weird thing is you don't really want to eat it like a soup, but drink it like a juice... which is still pretty darn delicious!

XO

p.s. Original recipe is from here.