Finding cold soup for warm weather


The other day, I noticed an odd amount of carrots in my refrigerator and decided to do something with them. Normally I would make carrot cake, but given the fact that I gave up sweets for lent, carrot cake was not an option.

Ginger carrot soup. – Photo courtesy of Robyn Lee

Ginger carrot soup. – Photo courtesy of Robyn Lee

Instead, I recalled a warm ginger carrot soup I’d had before but remembered thinking that it would be just as good chilled. I started looking around for some delicious chilled soup recipes and found a slew of ginger carrot soup recipes, but one stood out to me the most, a recipe by my favorite grocery store, Whole Foods Market.

This recipe is great because it uses eight simple ingredients, is vegan, fat free, high in fiber and sugar conscious – in other words, perfect. Additionally, ginger is a great immunity booster and when tasting this soup, you can really taste the ginger’s healing powers at work as you inhale the gingery fumes and feel the flavor engulf your throat and nostrils.

I am a huge fan of carrot ginger soup, but that doesn’t stop me from trying other types of soup. I recently made a tomato soup that tasted more like a Spanish Gazpacho than the classic Campbell’s Tomato soup. I tend to go for the savory over the sweet, but if you want a sweet cold soup, there are plenty cold soups with fruity flavors.

My search led me to a New York Times list of “12 Cold Soup Recipes.” The list divides the recipes into four, important soup categories: smooth, chunky, creamy and sweet. Normally, I’m a chunky soup girl, but the sweet section definitely caught my eye – I mean, come on, they have pineapple soup.

Smooth soups are great, but they often bring back nostalgia of my infant days – in other words, hello baby food.

The chunky soups are great, especially because watermelon gazpacho is included.

With that, I dare say that college students should get more creative and eat more soup? Soup is good for most any time of the day and is very tasty. All college students really need are a blender and a few random ingredients to create something spectacular. If you’re not a fan of making your own food and want to try a great place with the what LA Weekly calls “best soup in all of Los Angeles,” head over to Little Next Door and try their French Onion soup – it’s a good thirty minute drive with traffic to get there from USC, but in my opinion, it’s worth the trip.

Alegra Hueso is a sophomore majoring in creative writing.  Her column “In Love With the Edible” runs on Wednesdays in print and Fridays online.