It's all about the blender

A few days ago my friend Nikki posted a recipe for Cucumber Gazpacho with Spiced Croutons on Facebook, and since it is cucumber season (see my previous post) I decided to give it a try. I made a few adjustments to the recipe as posted. I peeled and diced four small cucumbers, added the juice of one lime, one peeled and diced avocado, one small diced onion, some garlic scrape I had frozen earlier in the CSA season, one seeded and chopped jalapeno pepper, and a bunch of fresh herbs (I don't know what they all were, they came in a bundle from my CSA farm box - I am pretty sure it included parseley, mint, and sage, but I don't know what else), and finally some olive oil. All was placed in the blender and set to "liquefy". I let is mix for quite a while, scraping the sides of the blender occasionally, and added more olive oil, but it never did become "a liquid". Eventually I figured it was good enough and put it in the 'fridge to chill for about an hour. We skipped the croutons, but did top it with some plain yogurt and garlic salt. It was velvety smooth, and loaded with flavors, but was more like eating dip than soup. Something I noticed in both of the cold cucumber soups I made was that "the total time" given in the recipes for preparing these dishes don't seem to account for actually doing the seeding, dicing and chopping called for in the recipes. For those who don't have a prep chef working in their kitchens, you will need about 20-25 minutes for this step.

For dessert we made the Raspberry Key Lime Cheesecake Milkshake. I cannot remember how we found out about this, but have been waiting for when we could find some good, fresh raspberries to make it, which we did (this along with the fact that we already had some vanilla ice cream in the freezer made it a good night to try it). I got to use the special "milkshake" attachment for our blender for the first time, and used the "milkshake" button. I pretty much followed the recipe as written for this one. All the flavors came through, and it was perfectly mixed, thanks to the proper devices! Smooth and creamy with a bit of tang. Yum.

Milkshake attachment