Summer Salad Soup

Oh it's true, we did it... we took all sorts of early summer greens and made them into soup.  As we were browsing through our vast collection of cookbooks, we stumbled across the Moosewood Cookbook.  Knowing that this was an excellent source of salad and soup recipes, we ripped it open and found the recipe for "Cream of Summer Greens".

This was a lovely title, but we like ours better.  We took Mollie Katzen's basic recipe and tweaked it up, just a little bit.  If you're intrigued by the thought of this cookbook, find it here... our copy is the original 1977 edition (that's right, we have the original).

If you are scared of green food... this is probably not the soup for you ... it is truly an intense color!

Salad Soup

1 lb. fresh spinach (you can use the prepackaged baby spinach)
2 cups roughly chopped zucchini
3(ish) cups of chopped sweet leaf lettuce (they now have packaged sweet lettuce mix, you can use that)
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh basil
2 Tbsp. scallions
1 Tbsp. parsley
1 quart buttermilk (we used fat free)
1 tsp. golden mountain sauce (alternatively, you can use light soy sauce)
1 Tbsp. dry sherry
dash of nutmeg
1/2 tsp. dill
2 tsp. kosher salt
LOTS of freshly ground black pepper

Boil 1 1/2 cups of water in a large pot.  Add zucchini and spinach.  Let these cook in the water for 5 minutes.  Remove from heat and puree the spinach and zucchini with the cooking water (we used a stick mixer, but you can use a food processor or a blender), set to the side.

Puree the lettuce, basil, scallions and parsley with 2 cups of buttermilk.  Combine lettuce puree with the spinach and zucchini puree.

Mix in remainder of buttermilk, and all remaining ingredients.  Taste as you go to see which seasonings need to be adjusted.

Chill for at least three hours.

We served ours with a swirl of ranch dressing, scallions and even more black pepper.

We found that a little of this soup goes a long way, it's rich in flavor.  We also found that we liked it warm just as well as chilled.  Whatever your preference, try it!!  We didn't strain ours, but if you prefer a smoother texture, we recommend putting it through a fine mesh strainer to remove some of the non pureed bits!

Enjoy.