Strawberry soup – a cheat’s version!

My apologies for the lack of contact over the last few weeks! My insistence on a decent summer holiday resulted in a slight social media break. Although this created a bit of soupy silence, I have returned with some great new soup ideas and will be sharing the resulting recipes with you soon.

The first recipe I want to share with you *may* be a bit of a cheat – depending on your definition of soup. OK, it is a complete cheat, but it’s fun!

I’ll get to the recipe soon, but thought I should explain my dilemma before I do. Our hot weather made me cranky so I searched for new chilled soup ideas. My investigation identified a bit of a phenomenon – pouring a smoothie into a bowl and calling it soup! I’m not talking smoothie bowls, I am a HUGE fan of the smoothie bowl. I literally mean putting your breakfast smoothie in a bowl. That made me anxious. Putting your smoothie in a bowl doesn’t make it soup, it’s just a smoothie… in a bowl! Can it really be a soup when you only assemble a few basic components?

You’ll understand my anxiety when I visited Easy Wine in Riga and spotted ‘Strawberry-peppermint soup with vanilla ice-cream and sparkling wine’ on the dessert menu. Fortunately, my need to try a soup that includes sparkling wine overcame my smoothie cynicism. Reader, I ordered it! I wasn’t disappointed, it was truly delicious.

I realise I would fail in my attempts to recreate it exactly, so have developed my own interpretation based (very loosely) on my Riga soup adventure. As I mentioned before, it really is just a bit of fun, but it is tasty fun and the addition of sparking wine makes it fancy enough to serve to friends on a lovely summer evening.

Strawberry soup – a cheat’s version

Serves 1

Difficulty Ridiculously easy

Suitable for Vegetarian, Vegan* and Gluten Free diets

(*depending on your choice of ice cream, yogurt and wine)

Ingredients

For the smoothie:

• 1/2 a banana
• 1 very ripe peach
• Approximately 300g fresh strawberries
• 1 heaped tablespoon plain yogurt
• 1 heaped tablespoon icing sugar {to give a thicker, more ‘pudding’ like texture}

• Ice cream – 1 scoop {I used Alpro vanilla. I’m not a huge ice cream fan, but had enjoyed the contrast between the ‘plain’ ice cream and the sharper fruit flavours so stuck with the traditional combo}
• Dash of sparkling wine {Prosecco, Cava, Champagne etc – any fizz will do, go with whatever takes your fancy}
• Fresh mint leaves to decorate {The original soup did mention mint in its title, however, I wasn’t aware of a strong mint flavour other than that provided by the leaves on top, so I went with that approach too}

Method

1. Blend all the smoothie ingredients together.
2. Put one scoop of ice cream in a bowl.
3. Pour over the smoothie mix. Make sure you leave enough room for your fizz to bubble up.
4. Decorate.
5. Add your dash of fizz.
6. Scoff the lot!