Foodgeek Blog

The experiment was successful.

2 pounds strawberries

applesauce (Didn’t measure, sorry.  Probably something like 2 cups.)

5 anjou pears

the juice of 2 oranges

honey to taste

1 pint heavy cream

1/2 brick cream cheese

I started by pureeing the strawberries and then mixing them with the applesauce, but in retrospect I wish I’d pureed the applesauce for a while to get it a little smoother.  The finished product was thicker in texture than I’d have liked.  Cut three of the pears into chunks, removing the seeds.  (Don’t worry about the skin.)  When pureeing the pears, I found it works best to add a little of the strawberry/applesauce mixture to the food processor.  Without it, the chunks of pear just ended up sticking to the sides of the bowl.  The added mixture kept the pears in contact with the blades.  Add the pureed pears to the strawberry mixture.  Add the orange juice.  Thinly slice the remaining pears and mix into the soup.

I added the pears to sweeten the soup, but I figured that if I added enough to get it to the level of sweetness I wanted that it would taste too heavily of pear.  The honey gets it the rest of the way.

Beat the cream cheese to soften and fluff it up a little.  Add the heavy cream and whip until medium peaks form.  This ended up being too much cream for the soup, but if you can’t think of anything else to do with cream cheese spiked whipped cream, then there’s no hope for you.  (Hint:  If nothing else, you could just eat it out of the bowl.  Mmmm.)  We used it for pumpkin bars.

Serve the soup with a dollop of the whipped cream.  Enjoy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become the unofficial cold soup guru for our Thursday gatherings.  For a couple of weeks now, I’ve wanted to create a recipe, completely from scratch.  I decided this week would be the week.  Ever since I started thinking about it, I’d had a difficult time deciding what to put in it.  I kept thinking tropical; pineapple, coconut, call it pina colada soup, or some such.  Then yesterday, inspiration hit.

Strawberries.

The plan (as it stands now) is to use apple sauce as the base (a whole bowl of pureed strawberries might be a little overpowering,) add a tub or two of pureed strawberries, some pureed pear to sweeten it up, probably some orange juice, and serve it with fresh whipped cream spiked with a little cream cheese.  (I haven’t thought all the way through the physics of that.  It might not work.)  Trying to decide about seasoning.  Mint doesn’t feel quite right, fresh cilantro sounds interesting to me.  I’ll probably just riff and see what happens.

Results to follow…