Dinner on a muggy night

If you are anywhere in the New England area this week, or just in the United States at all this summer, chances are you don't want to do much cooking.  After traveling for a week, and breaking out in a sweat just standing up I was not about to actually cook anything for dinner tonight.  Since I just got back last night from the OFA short course (more on that in the future once I've had a bit more sleep) the vegetable part of my diet has been lacking.

I have not been eating many of these.  Although I dissected a restaurant salad
and found both mizuna and tatsoi in it!

Not to worry!  Remember the class I went to on super nourishing greens back in the spring?  When everyone else said their favorite dish was the arugula pesto, my favorite was the greens soup.  The pesto was great, but it involved pasta, cheese and basil, which happen to be three of my Favorite Foods of All Time.  Not like this soup, which has not one, but three amazing things about it:

1. There is no cooking involved.
2. You get tricked into slurping up four vegetables without realizing it.  Five if you count avocado as a vegetable.
3. Zucchini is one of those vegetables.  We are just beginning zucchini season here, which means it is a treat and not something you feed to the dog because you have more summer squash than you know what to do with.

If you are my mom you might be thinking "what! avocado?!"  Yes, today I bought my first two avocados ever.  Perhaps this will be the year I discover how wonderful guacamole is because I have an extra one sitting in the fridge now.

Recipe 

(adapted from the Food and Health Forum- 

if you join their mailing list you get a whole digital cookbook!)

Blend together a cucumber, a whole bunch of kale and a cup of water.  Spinach would be fine too.  I did this with my immersion blender.  Dump in an avocado, juice from a lemon, a capful of soy sauce, a teaspoon of ginger and a pinch of cayenne.  Blend it some more. Then taste it.  Grate in one moderate sized (8 inch) zucchini and fold in a cup of corn.  Chill until served.  People may be put off by how it looks.  They are fools.

* Edit 7/19:  For dinner we had chips and cheese dip which balanced out the cool vegetable-ness.  Bruschetta would also be good on a not-so-muggy day.