Hot and Humid, Yuck!

This Wednesday, prior to my volleyball playoff games, Randi came over for dinner. I had great plans on making stuffed eggplant from a recipe my mother used to make growing up. However, by the time Randi came over there was only one thing on my mind "I am hot...ewwww..." As you guys may remember, Wednesday was hot and humid and totally disgusting. Not exactly the most inviting weather to spend sauteing and baking. After much hemming and hawing, we decided that yes, we needed to eat dinner, but we would make something else. Another thing that inspired us to get out of my house was that the grocery store had AIR CONDITIONING!!!

Although my house is sometimes painfully empty of groceries, we happened to have some leftover delicious feta cheese from the chicken dish and basil from the garden, perfect for bruschetta. I had also recently read a recipe for cold Cucumber Avocado Soup in Gourmet Magazine. Our heat addled minds decided that these dishes were simple enough to prepare for a light dinner.

Cucumber Avocado Soup
Recipe Courtesy of Gourmet Magazine
yields 4 servings


Ingredients:

1 chilled cucumber
1 avocado
2 scallions, chopped
1/4 cup mint leaves, chopped
1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk
1 1/2 cups cold water

Directions:

1) Cut cucumber into 3 equal pieces, then coarsely chop 2 of the cucumber pieces. Coarsely chop half of the avocado.

2) Blend together the chopped cucumber and avocado and the mint leaves, scallions, buttermilk, water and one teaspoon of salt until smooth.

3) Chill soup, uncovered, 15 minutes.

4) Cut remaining cucumber and avocado in 1/4 inch pieces and stir into soup.

Summer Feta Bruschetta

Ingredients:

Feta, crumbled
Fresh basil, chopped coarsely
Tomato, chopped
Sliced bread (we used a Tuscan style - sourdough would be good too)
Olive oil
Sea salt
Pepper

Directions:

1) Combine the feta, basil, tomato in a bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

2) Brush bread with olive oil and put in oven on Broil for a few minutes - until toasted.

3) Spoon mixture onto bread.

In my opinion, the soup was slightly too "oniony," so maybe I would cut out the scallions next time. The bruschetta was absolutely amazing and I could have eaten much, much more of it. So simple, yet so good. Here are Randi's comments:

Hey all, while Georgia, I think, was biased against this soup a bit from the start (complaining before and in the grocery store about hating scallions), I was more unsure about the cucumbers. I'm normally not a big fan of them, but in this soup they were light and refreshing. The extra chopped pieces of avocado in this soup were AWESOME, making it very creamy. And the added cucumbers added a nice crunch. I don't know what GA was saying about the oniony thing, I barely noticed them and they probably added some flavor. So unless you're weird about onions or scallions, I would say leave them in there. The thing that seriously made the bruschetta was the special sheep's milk feta Georgia found - amazing. Also, using Roma tomatoes didn't hurt either ;). I would say this is a solid light summer dinner or lunch... not necessarily perfect for groups, but good for one or two people.