Have you also had some of that wonderful summer weather lately? I have, and although I don’t have much time to spend outside, at least I managed to have dinner in the sun yesterday. We had a Pasta Salad (with mackerel and sun-dried tomatoes instead of chicken breast and corn) and this very light Turkish Cucumber Soup.
Turkish Cucumber Soup
1 cucumber
500 g yoghurt
2 tbsp. dried mint
salt
pink shrimps
garlic oil
Peel and de-seed the cucumber, then chop finely, sprinkle with salt and drain in a sieve. Wash of the salt, dap dry with a kitchen towel and mix with yoghurt, mint and shrimps. Leave to cool in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Salt to taste. Garnish with shrimps and garlic oil.
Notes:
Why should you first sprinkle the cucumber with salt, drain, make wet, dap dry and then salt again? Seriously, I have no idea. This seems to be the least logical recipe I have ever encountered. I’ll leave out this step next time. Anyway, it wasn’t much of a soup anyway, so any cucumber juices would have been welcome, as might some extra yoghurt.
The original recipe calls for two garlic cloves to be crushed, and pure olive oil to be used instead of garlic oil. I can definitely recommend that, as I thought the oil’s garlic taste was not strong enough for the soup; in fact, I didn’t like the oil at all and would not use it again (or let my guests decide that themselves).
We used shrimps because I saw that elsewhere; and pink shrimps because they were the cheapest and we have to pinch pennies at the moment (and because I wanted to add some extra seafood to our menu); but unfortunately, they weren’t really worth it. Either chose good, expensive shrimps, or leave them out altogether to make a vegetarian meal!
