mulberryshoots

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ~ Mary Oliver

Month: July, 2020

cream of cucumber soup recipe. . .

IMG_1392IMG_1386One our favorite soups, summer and winter, is cream of cucumber soup. I’ve been experimenting with the recipe for the easiest preparation and which tastes the best.

My traditional way to prepare the soup was to buy 4-5 large regular cucumbers, peel them and seed them all before slicing them up to make the soup. This process was a lot of work, especially seeding the cucumbers, yielding less than a desired amount of cucumber pulp.

Last week, I used 9 Persian cucumbers that I had picked up (buy 1 pack get 1 free) and made the soup without peeling them. Cooked with shallots and chicken broth, adding cream at the end, the soup was tasty, but even after I ran it through a food mill, there were still specks of green peel in the soup.

Today, I bought two of the largest ENGLISH cucumbers I could find, peeled them in a jiffy, and sliced them up for the soup. They’re cooking now in a pot with a large chopped shallot, 3 Tb. unsalted butter and a stock made with water to cover the cucumbers and a Knorr chicken gelatin broth packet. They cook for about a half an hour until soft and then cool.

Once cooled, I use an immersion blender (so handy!) to puree the soup. I taste for seasoning and usually don’t add any salt because the chicken broth provides enough in the stock. Right before serving, I pour in some cream – light or heavy, depending on the thickness of the soup base.

Hope this will be the best version for the recipe – not too much prep, no skins in the soup, and a delicious quick soup for any time of the year!

lemon cream cheese refrigerator pie!

IMG_1339IMG_1341If you like the taste of cream cheese, you’ll love this old classic, lemon cream cheese refrigerator pie. Before serving, I plan to place fresh fruit on top of the pieces I’m going to cut: tonight it’s going to be raspberries, and tomorrow, it will be white nectarines!

I baked the store-bought graham cracker crust for about 10 min. at 375 degrees after removing the plastic protector. In the meantime, I let two 8 ounce packages of cream cheese to come to room temp and opened a can of Eagle condensed milk. Also squeezed fresh lemons to yield 1/2 cup of juice.

When I first began beating the filling mixture with a portable mixer, the cream cheese turned into tiny lumps – so I switched over to an immersion blender and with a few swigs of it, the filling became velvety smooth.

When the crust had cooled, I transferred the filling into it and smoothed it out to the edges of the crust. And behold!, I discovered that I could re-use the plastic crust protector into a lid to crimp around the pie and set in the refrigerator to chill for a couple of hours before serving it. Looking forward to having this light, refreshing pie to add fresh fruit to – for a few nights this week!