Soupalooza: Experimenting with flavored ice cubes in smoothies, soups and more
It's time to go crazy with ice cubes! Coffee ice cubes. Bloody Mary ice cubes. Wine ice cubes. Even dessert ice cubes.
If you want to keep your drinks from getting watered down plus adding a bit more zip to your concoctions, try your hand at flavored ice cubes. All you need is an ice tray or two and your imagination.
There are plenty of great ideas floating around there: You can freeze coconut milk and add it to your smoothies or iced tea. Drop cilantro ice cubes into your margaritas or mint cubes into mojitos. Freeze berries in your ice cubes and add them to seltzer water. Greek yogurt and strawberries are perfect ice cube treats all on their own.
And don't forget to add ice cubes to your cold soups. Savory cubes — filled with basil, cilantro, tomato juice or even green chiles — are perfect accompaniments to gazpacho or other cold soups. Fruit soups can be enhanced, as well. For instance, if you are serving a cold peach yogurt soup, add ice cubes made of yogurt, peaches and mint. They will keep the soup cold and add an extra punch of flavor.
A recipe I found in Shape magazine paired a chilled carrot soup with ice cubes made of buttermilk and sweet peas. The soup recipe itself is fairly traditional and quite yummy on its own, with ginger, cumin, coriander and lemon juice to balance the sweetness of the carrots. Actually, at first, I wasn't sure it needed the ice cubes.
Made from blending buttermilk and frozen sweet peas, I gave the cubes a taste before adding them to the soup. They were somewhat jarring in their blandness. (I think we expect everything frozen to be sweet!) They were definitely not something you would want to eat on their own, but when you add them to the soup some sort of magic happens. They brought out a whole new dimension of flavor and creaminess to the soup with the tartness of the buttermilk and the velvety sweetness of the peas.
The addition of pea sprouts as a finishing touch gave the soup a little needed crunch.
In any case, I'm hooked on ice cubes right now. They are a perfect vehicle for leftover ginger, parsley, blueberries, pomegranates, you name it. If you can chop it, you can freeze it. Go crazy!
• M. Eileen Brown is the Daily Herald's director of strategic marketing and innovation and an incurable soup-a-holic. She specializes in vegetarian soups and blogs at http://www.soupalooza.com>soupalooza.com.