Cold Watermelon Soup

This is a wonderful soup for outside dining in this hot weather. It uses two ingredients that are at the peak of their season: seedless watermelons and Walla Walla sweet onions. At the restaurant, customers have been curious about it and it has been very well received. I admit that the idea for this combination is not mine (I have to thank Donna Waskom for that) but I took her salad, deconstructed it and then reassembled it into this. You should be able to produce this soup in short order. I have divided this into three parts: the soup and a two-part garnish. You’ll find a hand blender very useful here.

Ingredients:

Soup

1 5lb seedless watermelon

1/3 cup of red wine vinegar

Pinch of salt

Sweet Onion Garnish

1 medium Walla Walla sweet onion sliced into rings

1 Tablespn mint ciffonade

1/4-cup grape seed oil

2 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar

Pinch of salt

Final Touch

Crumbled feta cheese

Procedure

Soup: Cut the watermelon into workable sized pieces and then cut away the rind placing the red flesh of the melon in a suitable bowl. Puree it until it is smooth with the hand blender (or use a food processor). Add the red wine vinegar and a pinch of salt. (It is interesting to take a bowl of the soup and try adding more salt or more vinegar as the taste changes in unexpected ways.)

Sweet onion garnish: Peel the onion and slice it into thin rounds. Make a vinaigrette by whisking together the rice wine vinegar, grape seed oil, mint, and the salt. Pour the vinaigrette over the onion slices and let it sit for a few minutes.

To assemble the soup: Ladle a suitable amount of soup into a bowl, make a 2 inch raft of the sweet onion and mint in the middle and then top it all with a teaspoon or so of the crumbled feta cheese. Enjoy!