La Recette du Jour

From this:

to this:

This bold experiment is the result of a discussion about what to do with left-over dressed salad. Normally it just gets thrown away, but I remembered reading about someone using it to make gazpacho. I though this sounded disgusting. But last night we had 14 people for dinner, and we made a huge fattoush salad: lettuce, onions, yellow pepper, tomatoes, cucumber, and mint, with toasted diced pitta bread thrown in at the last minute.There was so much I didn’t have a bowl big enough, so I made it in my huge stockpot, and although we ate a lot there was a lot left over.

Given that it was in the stockpot, why not try it? So here is … left-over salad soup!

I debated whether to remove the pitta bread, but hey, gazpacho has bread in it. So I left it in. The dressing was just lemon juice and my best olive oil, so I just put the pot on the heat and sauted the salad gently for a few minutes.

Then I added some Marigold bouillon powder and water and brought it to the boil.

Looks disgusting, doesn’t it? It looked even worse in the blender after I’d simmered it for 20 minutes.

The colour of the end result was a bit disappointing — it was kind of … beige. But it tasted surprisingly good; if you served it to someone without telling them what it was, I don’t think they’d guess. Unfortunately now I have about 5 litres of the stuff. But next time you have a lot of left-over salad, it’s worth a try!