Spicy Zucchini Soup

This week's soup uses several ingredients from our very own backyard garden!

I got the recipe from SimplyRecipes.com which is one of my favorite sites for recipes. They have an email alert of new daily postings of recipes which is about the only such alert that I like.

This is a pretty straightforward recipe. You start off sauteing, in 4 tablespoons of olive oil, a whole onion that is chopped and one half of a jalapeno chili. You remove the stem, seeds and ribs from the jalapeno before cooking. I've learned the hard way that when you work with chilis using rubber gloves is a great idea! Even if you're very careful about not touching your eyes or nose the chilis still can leave a burning sensation on your hands for hours even after repeated washing.

Back to the sauteing. You saute until the onions are translucent not browned, about 4-5 minutes. To the onion and chilis add 5-6 cups of chopped zucchini. If the zucchinis you use are very large ones you'll need to peel and remove the seeds before chopping. This was the case with one of the zucchinis I used from our garden. If you use smaller zucchinis your can leave the skin and seeds. Along with the zucchini add 3 chopped garlic cloves. Saute for another 8-10 minutes stirring often. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. When you add the zucchini it may seem that you need a larger pot but the zucchini will cook down some so you're likely going to be fine with the pot you started with.

Add 1.5 cups of chopped sourdough bread. If you get a chance to leave a few slices of bread out all day to dry a bit that's great. If you are not able to do that then simply toast the slices lightly to get a dry texture to the bread. Along with the bread add 3 cups of chicken or vegetable broth (vegetable broth makes this soup completely vegetarian) and 1 cup of water. Bring the ingredients to a simmer, reduce heat and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

Turn off the heat. Add 1/2 cup of loosely packed chopped mint leaves, 1/2 cup of cilantro loosely packed and chopped. Puree the mixture in a blender or food processor and return to the pot. But the best way to puree is with an immersion blender. If you don't have one and make soups on a regular basis then an immersion blender is a must. Bertie gave me one for my birthday last April and I love it. The one I have is powerful and has attachments like a little food processor, whisker and smoothie maker. It is made by Cuisinart here's a link to Amazon for my model http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-CSB-77-Blender-Chopper-Attachments/dp/B0006G3JRO/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=kitchen&qid=1282743363&sr=1-19.

After returning the soup to the pot add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, add salt and pepper to taste.

After finishing the soup last night I found it was missing something that I couldn't put my finger on. Usually when this occurs I add some lemon juice to give it a little tang but it already had plenty of lemon juice. I did add more salt but I have to be careful with salt because I love salt and can easily over salt for most people's tastes. Another couple of tastes and the soup still wasn't quite there. I added a couple of pinches of white pepper and that helped but still not quite there. Note: be very judicious with white pepper because a little goes a very long way. I was thinking about some fresh basil and/or some cream. I decided to sleep on it and after warming up the soup in the morning went with about 3/4 cup of cream. This addition got it closer but I'm still not fully satisfied but we'll wait to get my co-workers' opinions.

So, the fresh ingredients from Patterson Farms were the zucchini, mint and jalapeno. If I had used basil that would have come from our garden also. I'll include some pics of our garden boxes in a later posting. We had a great summer of vegetables this year. Tomatoes, tomatillos, chilis, eggplants, mint, thyme, basil and rosemary.

Off to work and Soup at Work Wednesday.