After my Mom passed away, I inherited her kitchen. Not just her batterie de cuisine, but the entire room in the house, cabinets and appliances and all. Since then, her kitchen has become my special place where you would likely find me any hour of the day.
Obviously I have added many new things to her kitchen since. My Mom and I have such different cooking styles. She cooked with a cleaver and made many simple Cantonese dishes with good variety of fresh ingredients by steaming, blanching, sautéing, and pan-frying. I cannot imagine spending time in the kitchen without my trusty Le Creuset dutch oven to braise, my chef knife to cut, and my stand mixer for all kinds of baking projects. However, despite all the new additions, most things remain exactly where she left them because the storage location just makes sense. For example, everyone knows where to find the melon baller because the gadget drawer has been the permanent residence of the melon baller since the day we moved in. We wouldn’t even bother looking in the cutlery drawer because it has never and will never contain what we’re looking for.
Not that my brother nor I would look for the melon baller when there’s a melon on the cutting board anyway. Little spheres of chilled cantaloupe or honeydew may seem like the height of cuteness to many children but not to us. Melon is one of Little Brother’s favourite fruit and he would eat them in any shape or form. Me? Not so much. I have always been ambivalent about melons. Being the resourceful woman that she was, of course my Mom had a trick up her sleeve. Well, here is how melon is served at my home.
How can melon balls even compete with melon stars!
This week’s recipe for French Fridays with Dorie is Cold Melon-Berry Soup. It is the perfect solution to a pile melon scraps. All the scraps get pureed to juice and seasoned with a healthy dose of freshly squeezed lime juice and grated ginger root. The citrus tartness and the zing from the ginger may not seem like much but they are the key ingredients that transform chilled cantaloupe puree from juice to soup. Cantaloupe stars and thick-sliced strawberries add substance to an otherwise very light course.
I fully expected this cold soup to taste like a fruit cocktail but I was wrong. Even with just a handful of simple ingredients, there is a savoury aspect to the soup that makes it appropriate as a light first course. It is very delicious when well-chilled. I served mine in stemmed red wine glasses. The chunks of fresh fruit look so enticing floating on top of the pastel colour soup. Just looking at the soup makes the stifling heat a little easier to bear.
Click here to check out other blogger’s interpretation of the Cold Melon-Berry Soup. I bet there’ll be some gorgeous photographs to admire. Don’t forget to check out Dessert By Candy’s first giveaway too. There is still time to enter the contest!
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