My Morning Chocolate

The winning shot: cold avocado and cucumber soup

In last week’s  New York Times, there was an article I read by Jhumpa Lahiri – I would gladly give up chocolate chips for the ability to write beautiful sentences like her – about  vacationing and cooking on Cape Cod.

The story came out on Wednesday while I was still in Ocean City; my family arrived on Thursday for a week’s stay.  Like Jhumpa, I packed cooking supplies for my trip (my stand mixer, two cookie sheets, a microplane) and cooked most of our meals out of one functional cooking vessel – in my case, a wok instead of a cast iron skillet.

There were so many cooking similarities between her trip and ours that I had to make the recipe for Cold Avocado and Cumber Soup that Jhumpa makes while she vacations.  I already had a handful of cucumbers in the condo.  My local store didn’t have buttermilk or dill; I made my own sour milk by stirring half a tablespoon of lemon into ½ cup of milk and used mint.

I imagine Jhumpa’s family actually eats this soup, everyone coming together to enjoy the fresh, salty taste and smooth texture.

Darren helped me cut the vegetables (in the picture below, he is cutting zucchini, which wasn’t used in this recipe.  I forgot to take a picture of him cutting the cucumber.) and my dad ate a bowl…

Darren cutting zucchini

but my family really came alive when it was time to take a photograph for this blog:

I start by taking a picture of the soup alone, ladled into a white bowl and placed on a wooden cutting board. “It needs a garnish,” my friend Jessie says.  I disagree, the recipe doesn’t call for garnishes.

She presses on. “Cut a cucumber in half and fold the ends out.”

I don’t know what she is talking about. I pick up a fresh cucumber, slice off a round disc, and place it in the bowl.

“No, like this,” she says, making a small cut through half of the disc and twisting the ends in opposite directions. It does look very pretty.

Seeing how this has improved the look of the soup, my mom is up and running to the deck, scissors in hand, calling “We need rosemary!” over her shoulder. She moves too fast for me to tell her that there is no rosemary in the recipe, that I used mint. No problem, she drops her rosemary sprig on the table and goes back out to pluck some mint leaves. Into the bowl they go; I snap another picture.

Then Kenny decides we need a spoon next to the bowl. Down goes the spoon and he takes a picture plus 12 more – from above, then angled; with a spoon and without; with a full cucumber on the side; sometimes using the flash, sometimes turning it off.

I didn’t like the spoon.  But all of the other ideas are represented in the final shot.  See the end result of our family togetherness above and the inferior pictures below.

Here’s to making this recipe in the last weeks of summer and bonding over random aspects of the process.