Summer Soup, Bachelor Style

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

This is the hottest summer I've ever lived anywhere. We solar-beleaguered Austinians are moving into toward our fiftieth day of triple digits, and the annual August exhaustion has only just begun! It's sometimes difficult to think about standing around in a hot kitchen cooking things when a guy wilts walking outside from his car to the front door.

This less pleasant version of getting baked can really make a single guy dread cooking or grilling anything. If you have friends coming for dinner, however, you gotta figure out how to fight those flagging culinary ambitions. I have come with help: cold soup!

In the hot summer months, the last thing a person wants to eat is soup (well, at least me, anyway). Actually, I just lied, because over the pond folks eat cold soup to help cool off. Perhaps the most famous cold soup is Gazpacho, a refreshing, tomato-based, raw-vegetable soup that hails from south Andalusia and is popular in Portugal and Spain.

What began as a cold soup made with bread and oil turned into a tomato-based vegetable soup over the centuries. Because the variations on Gazpacho have exploded in the last few centuries (some even without any tomatoes), the lower-cased "gazpacho" is now frequently used to describe any cold soup! Frankly, I think that's bad form. Folks should say "Gazpacho" when they mean cold soup with a tomato base, and "cold soup" for the variations. That's just my opinion (I don't think martinis should be shaken, either, and they're made with gin, dang-it. When I order a martini I expect the tender to day, "will that be with Bombay or Beefeater, not some unadulterated vodka!).

I've discovered at some of the nice restaurants in town that watermelon gazpacho seems quite popular (and what else is summer for except eating watermelons). A friend and I drove a good piece out west to visit a little known restaurant in which the cook both seats and serves you. The experience was intimate and nice, but hands-down the best thing we had was a watermelon tomato cold soup with pine nuts. Okay, I wouldn't say it was the best, because technically I am not fond of watermelons. But like Eve, I didst eat. And I appreciated the creativity of the dish.

A couple of weeks ago some friends were driving in town for a weekend visit, and I was to prepare dinner for the evening. It had taken us two months to figure out a time we could get together. So it was time to play the bachelor host, triple digits or not. I remembered the watermelon soup and a recipe I used to make that was a kind of a Spanish vegetable porridge, made from sour cream and processed raw veggies. It's quite tasty, but I had a hankering for cucumber soup—without the watermelon I did a quick search on the InterTubes and found dozens of recipes. I combined what I liked about each of them, made some substitutions (e.g., Greek yogurt instead of regular yogurt for consistency), and tried it out. It was delicious! Fortunately, I wrote down my Franken-recipe. Here it is!

Serves/Makes: 6

• 3 pounds cucumbers peeled, seeded and chopped
• 1 small white onion, chopped
• OR
• 5 green onions, chopped
• 3 tablespoons olive oil (more if needed)
• 1 red bell pepper
• 2 yellow bell pepper
• 1 jalapeno pepper, chopped (more if desired)
• 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro (more if desired)
• 2 tablespoons mint (more if desired)
• 2 tablespoons dill (more if desired)
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 cups plain Greek yogurt
• 2 1/2 cups sour cream
• 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
• 1 avocado, chopped into cubes
• salt and pepper, to taste