The Road to Gastric Distress is Paved with Good Intentions.

Against my better judgement, I have decided to run a cooking experiment as a blog subject. This is a poor idea for the following reasons:
1. This was decided as part of a whimsical journey to turn something "inedible" into a fancy dish I have never made before.
2. My mother follows my blog and will probably read this before I serve the "experiment" for dinner. The last thing I really need right now is for her to spread insurrection amongst the guinea pigs after reading about my extremely non-food-scientific methods.
3. I committed to this recipe under the assumption that I had all the ingredients I needed. Au. Con.trair.

This doesn't look so complicated...

Chilled cucumber soup is often prompted by an affluence of cucumbers from the garden. My first deviation is that this is not a problem I have. As a matter of fact none of the cukes I planted really thrived, and I'm only just now getting little baby cucumbers on one anemic little cucurbita (don't mistake my aversion to redundancy for horticultural expertise, I had to look that up. More on what a gardening newb I am further down.)

"Are you my mother?"

In fact my trouble is my own impatience.

I'll cop to it. I have never grown watermelon before, despite it being one of my favorite foods. After 3 months from seeds to taking over the back row of my 20x20 garden plot, I spied a melon that had grown large very quickly. The "thump" sounded right, so I gave it a shot, and sliced it open intending to serve it with dinner that night.

I was massively disappointed to discover I had de-vined the melon before it's time in my inexperience! it was totally pale green on the inside. Not exactly the sweet treat I intended for dessert. 
Bravely I gave it a taste, and found that while it wasn't sweet it DID taste a great deal like cucumber.
I had hope that this farmgirl would be able to make something of this immature melon!

No, not THAT kind of immature melon!!

THIS kind of immature melon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So here I have brought you, gentle reader, to the forefront of my mellonic motivation!

I had massive amounts of green melon (while not a technically "large" melon in and of itself, if substituting for cucumber, it works out to a good deal of cucumber) and I had plain yogurt leftover from starting my home fermented jars and on that assumption alone I presumed I had my bases covered. Since I had a fresh lemon, dried dill, and garlic salt I figured I could get away with fudging my lack of mint, fresh dill and garlic cloves and leave salt out of the recipe.
I began with slicing and  cutting the rind off the green melon.

I didn't think it would be necessary to grate the melon as it was pretty juicy and I would be just putting it in the blender anyway.
When I peeked into the plain yogurt container it should have been nearly full, as I only bought it for starter for homemade 'gurt.
Alas. Someone had tried eating about a cup of the stuff. Thankfully I remembered that *some* cucumber soup recipes call for an extremely thick sour cream, so I fudged in a cup of sour cream to fill the rest of my yogurt measures, a necessary step as the fam polished off the entirety of yesterday's homemade.
I spotted another recipe entirely that suggested celery seed so I decided to toss some of that in as well, and my sweet basil is particularly zesty and prolific so I decided to throw in a large diced handful of it, shooting for a more savory herb mixture in the cold soup.

I stirred all the ingredients and tossed it in my leaky blender. How is it my mother owned one ugly green plastic Osterizer my entire childhood and it never cracked or burned out (despite smelling like brimstone when it ran) but I have gone through no less than 5 blenders in my 9 year marriage?






Anyway. I banked on pureeing the ingredients before they began to seep out the bottom of the blender jar and all over the counter, and succeeded. Just barely.

Looks nice.... doesn't taste bad. Lets see what the kids say?

Whatever. These little urchins think "fine dining" comes from a drive through.
They look more like my husband anyway.
I actually think it tastes quite good, just maybe not sweet and dessert-ish like I always assumed cucumber soup would be.
On the upside, if no one eats it, I can jar the stuff and freeze it for my next potluck. Some pots are always luckier than others.