Cucumber and Yogurt Mint Soup with Barley

Our food news feed continues to deliver some great ideas and recipes for our readers. This recipe came from our US food news feed. The original article from the Miami Herald titled “Beat the heat with refreshing cold soup” discussed traditional gazpacho chilled soup for summer but also provided us two white based soups that are less acidic. We chose this recipe to try and modified it slightly based on our tastes and ingredients on hand. The original article included an additional buttermilk soup recipe.

This soup was a lot better than expected.  It provided a nice cool chilled flavor with lots of texture and a kick of spice. Refreshing for sure on a nice hot summer day. The flavors improved with a good 3-4 hour chill before serving. You can adjust the consistency of the soup to your liking with the milk at the end of the process.  The 1 1/2 cups of milk will provide a thick soup which could be thinned further by using non-fat milk or more milk.

On the second day we tried some of the original stock with a ratio of only 1 cup of milk and found this to make an excellent dip with crackers.  Perfect as an appetizer for your summer cookout.

An good healthy vegetarian recipe although not light on the calories.  It will fill you up and make you feel refreshed.

Ingredients

• 1 cup pearl barley
• 3 cups water
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound small cucumbers
• 4 cups yogurt
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 to 3 tablespoons finely diced, seeded jalapeno pepper
• 1/3 cup finely diced red onion
• 4 tablespoon chopped mint, divided
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
• Paprika

Method