While I’ll never know what my husband threw out during my recent trip to the US, I found only one obviously spoiled item–a small container of cooked beans. (And the kitchen was clean too.) I salvaged a few vegetables for a marinara sauce leaving me with some fruit, including an iffy-looking watermelon:
I decided to make a fruit soup. A comprehensive search yielded a soft mango, nectarines, a few apples, and half a lemon.
I cut the fruit into cubes:
(The melon pictured is a red herring–I served it to the cooperative day camp that day. It was fresh and this variety of melon, similar to cranshaw, failed in my last fruit soup. We don’t have honeydew or cantaloupe here, not that I’ve used them for soup.)
I kept the yellow bowl handy for peels and seeds–I prefer throwing them from the bowl into the garbage over scooping them out of the sink afterward. I bought the cutting board, made in an Israeli kibbutz, for a bridal shower I never attended. It’s built so that the cubes and juice drop at an angle directly into a bowl fitting underneath.
I put the fruit cubes and lemon juice into the pressure cooker, covered them with water, and cooked the soup under pressure for ten minutes (equivalent to half an hour in a conventional pot). A microwave would work well for a small quantity. This particular fruit combination required no added sugar.
You can use this technique for just about any amount and variety of fruit. I like to add pears, strawberries, summer fruits, or sour cherries from a jar.
Serve cold garnished with fresh mint.
I rarely make fruit soup anymore; instead I cook soft summer fruit like nectarines, peaches and plums in the microwave. Put sliced, unpeeled fruit in a large bowl (with no water), and stir every few minutes until the fruit is covered with juice. My kids love this either hot or cold. Try it with ice cream.
Have a cool summer.
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