PrintSunday Night Soups: Roasted Cantaloupe Soup
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
In case you missed them last week, the Patriots are back on Sunday night, hosting the Eagles at what promises to be a chilly Gillette Stadium. Befitting his North Atlantic origins, the Gurgling Cod has been a Patriots fan since he was a fingerling, but he understands that not everyone shares his joy at their success. In the wake of Spygate, the Pats' quest for a perfect season has taken on a somewhat grim and inexorable quality. It is professional football, and charges that the Pats have been running up the score only lead to tedious and predictable arguments, but Patriots head coach Bill Belichick does appear to be doing a season-long audition for the role of Ahab. Making matters, worse, a forecast gametime temperature of around 30°F means that Belichick will be accessorizing his trademark hoodie with the inexplicable cold weather headband. In tandem with the requisite coach headphone-microphone set, he looks like a soccer mom-cum-Panzer commander. Come to think of it, that's not a bad description of the SUV-driving Hingham hausfraus you might encounter on 128 on the way to the game, but I digress.
This Sunday Night Soup will be the last of eating and football after a long weekend of both. Rather than concoct some sort of chessesteak chowder, allow me to suggest something, light, nay, vegan? (Exactly the kind of brilliant misdirection Ahab excels in, come to think of it.) This soup is one of my favorites, especially when there are fussy eaters vegetarians in the mix. The color of the finished soup is close to the shade of orange in the Dolphins' uniforms, but at 0-10, it seems unlikely that they will be muscling their way onto the primetime schedule, so we will sneak it in here. This soup is pie-easy, refrigerates well, and offers a change of pace from the food the color of men's slacks you've been eating all weekend. This soup's antecedent is a tomato-melon soup in Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks at Home, but I'd argue that the refinement of roasting the cantaloupe makes for a fundamentally different soup, especially with the possibly suboptimal melon you may find at this time of year.
About the author: The Gurgling Cod, aka 'Fesser, writes The Gurgling Cod, a blog that is primarily concerned with food.
Gurgling Cod Roasted Cantaloupe Soup
Ingredients
4 good size tomatoes (or around 2 pounds)
1 cantaloupe
Pretty good olive oil
1 ludicrously expensive package of basil (the kind sold in the small plastic clamshells) or equivalent
1 lemon
Procedure
1. Preheat oven to 400°F. Boil a pot of water.
2. Cut the melon in half, scoop out the seeds, cut melon into slices and remove rind from melon. Put a generous slug or two of olive oil in a cast iron skillet, and swirl melon pieces around in the oil. Give another swirl in 10 minutes or so.
3. While the melon roasts, prep tomatoes: use a paring knife to remove the core of the tomato (you will remove a cone shaped section, oriented around the north pole of the tomato), cut a shallow X in the bottom, and drop into boiling water for 30 seconds, then dunk in ice water. Cut tomatoes in half, and work skins off under running cold water, and use the water to rinse out all the seeds—you will have to pull the tomato apart a bit as you do this.
4. When the cantaloupe pieces are starting to lose structural integrity, and you have a nice slurry of olive oil and cantaloupe essence in the skillet, but before anything chars, turn the cantaloupe out into a bowl, leaving at least some of the slurry in the pan, and add the tomatoes, adding more oil if they threaten to stick. Cook tomatoes just enough so that they do not taste raw.
5. When melon and tomato are cool enough to work with, combine with basil and some ice in a blender. Make sure you get all the slurry in there. You remembered to rinse the basil. Add some lemon, reblend, and check seasoning. Allow soup to chill, 45 minutes.
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7 Comments:
I'm assuming that you roast the cantaloupe in the aforementioned cast iron skillet in the 400' oven? The recipe is a tad vague there.
This looks really tasty but...chilled soup in November? If I wanted to go the meatless route I probably would have chosen squash- or mushroom-based.
Spot on with the overpriced fresh herbs, though. I paid $3 for some thyme that I made turkey stock with yesterday.
jd7979 at 5:10PM on 11/24/07
Yes, roast the melon in the 400' oven.
If it is the chilling part that concerns you, you can serve at room temperature, I've done that once or twice when pressed for time, and it is still good. The nice thing about this soup is that it is a veggie soup where you are not aware of the absence of a good chicken or turkey stock, as is often the case with squash or mushroom soups. If you do try, let me know what you think.
The Gurgling Cod at 5:39PM on 11/24/07
Any food suggestions for us ailing Redskins fans?! Aw... forget it, I've lost my appetite...
play-with-food at 8:56PM on 11/25/07
the dolphins have, in fact, muscled their way into primetime, in tonight's monday night game.
carriebwc at 9:14AM on 11/26/07
Good point about the fact that you don't need a stock of any kind--not even a vegetable broth! While Italians have been preparing soups this way for years, I understand that more chefs and culinary professionals are advocating water as a braising liquid for vegetables so that no other flavors compete with the produce your recipe features.
I hadn't realized that people were roasting melons until reading your recipe. I bet that if you roast the tomatoes, too, you might be very pleased.
Nonetheless, why settle for sub-par cantaloupes? Or tomatoes for that matter? One of the implicit messages of locavorism is that the flavor of foods is so much better when they're in season. Tomatoes and melons peak at exactly the same time. How about turning on the A/C and whipping up a batch to watch a baseball game?
Eliz. at 4:09PM on 11/26/07
PWF -- Your comment went up before the terrible sad news about Sean Taylor. Extending condolences to the fan of a team on the death of a player seems inappropriate, but I am sad and sorry about the whole thing.
Eliz- Yes, obviously better to use the best produce at its peak, and I have made this soup in the summer with homegrown 'lopes. During the months when the only veggies peaking are turnips, I do think it is worthwhile, and respectful to the produce, to do what one can to make the most of the flavor. There is a brothless soup with diced prosciutto, orchetti, and greens I used to make -- will have to dig up the receipt and see if I can find an angle for it for one of the remaining games.
The Gurgling Cod at 10:24AM on 11/27/07
Gurgles: Ever try Deborah Madison's recipe for turnip soup w greens? I hear you, really, I do. However, hearty greens thrive at this time of year and there is so much variety now compared to a couple of decades ago when all you could find this side of the Mississippi were pale heads of a single type of cabbage--or maybe a decorative kale that made its way to the supermarket by mistake. Then there are dried legumes, winter squash, mushrooms, members of the cruciform family and root vegetables in addition to meat, pasta and grains. You had a recipe for pumpkin soup w farro, I believe, which sounds perfect.
I wouldn't have said anything except this year I switched from drinking juice at breakfast to eating fresh fruit instead as a weight-loss strategy. During the transition between the peak seasons of citrus fruit and melons, grapefruit were pucker-inducing, tiny and dry. The first melons, mealy and faint in flavor. The last, watery. I turned back to juice until just this past week since finally, FINALLY, the oranges are good.
Besides, it just makes me sad to see all those folk reaching for strawberries, heirloom tomatoes and off-season produce at Whole Foods at this time of year. People who do not grow their own or shop at farmers markets may not be used to the difference between a just-picked ear of corn in July and the already shucked February cob wrapped snugly in plastic. I have no problem w the off-season heads of lettuce shipped from California, but I refuse to take off my gloves to buy a peach. The only way to get supermarkets to stop giving the public what it thinks it wants even though it knows the quality is inferior, is to stop buying it.
In the end, I raise a glass to your Sunday Night tradition! All the cold season long, I make batches of soup on a regular basis. Last week: lemony cardoon w tiny little meatballs and another w celery root, leeks and celery. This time around it's a variation on a Tuscan soup, using up some 'ncapriata (fava bean purée) in the freezer instead of cannellini in vegetable broth w a little stock, chickpeas and farro, flavored with dried rosemary and canned, imported tomatoes.
Eliz. at 12:34PM on 11/27/07