Double Leftover Soup

I made two soups for lunch today. Well, I made them both earlier in the week… I just ate them both as leftovers today.

The first soup was roughly based on Aarti Sequeira’s cucmber lychee gazpacho recipe. I just went with 4 small cucumbers, the juice of 1 lemon, 2 tsp dill (comes in a tube like toothpaste), 2 tsp garlic (again with the tube), 2 cups plain Fage Total 0 Greek yogurt, threw it all in a blender, and served it cold. I really liked this one. I made it a couple times already.

I can’t remember where I got the stupid idea to make tomato barley soup. I don’t really know what the original ingredients were, but I wrote down: 1 can peeled and diced tomatoes with the juice, handful of cherry tomatoes, 2 1/2 cups water, 1 can vegetable broth, 1 tsp olive oil, 2 teaspoons garlic from the tube, 1/4 cup uncooked barley (I used quinoa because I didn’t have barley), 1 cup chopped carrots. I decided at the last minute that I didn’t want chunks of carrots, so I blended them before putting them in the pot with everything else for 35 minutes. Apparently blended carrots are super frothy when you boil them, so I had to clean up the stovetop when the pot boiled over. The cherry tomatoes exploded during the boiling, too. So when it was done, I was scooping out unappealing tomato skin carcasses from the pot. It tasted like tomato soup and the quinoa tasted pretty much like barley. Wow. That was a lot of work for tomato soup, which is on sale at Food Maxx for like 29 cents right now. I ended up sprinkling in some salt & pepper… along with some leftover pickled carrots from yesterday’s Wrap recipe, since the original carrots escaped from the pot. I guess I actually wanted chunks of carrot after all. It was good by the time I was done, but I probably won’t make it again.

I considered mixing the two soups together, but decided that would be gross.