No photos, once again, but only because tonight's dinner was distressingly monochrome. I made 44-clove garlic soup with a simple salad of lettuce and cucumbers with an espresso granita for dessert, but with modifications to both the soup and granita recipes.
As to the soup, I didn't particularly feel like putting heavy cream in it, so I decided to go vegan with the stuff. I used margarine instead of butter to cook the onions and thyme in, didn't add cream or milk, and omitted the Parmesan. The stock, obviously, was vegetarian. To tell you the truth, I don't think cheese would have added anything to the soup; pepper and thyme were more than enough to accent the amazing, amazing flavor combination of roasted and unroasted garlic, and such a strong cheese would probably have detracted from it. It's more healthful this way, too. Similarly, I added a squirt of lemon juice to the whole soup, whereas the recipe calls for a whole quarter lemon per bowl. I cannot overstate the deliciousness of what resulted. It's surprisingly subtle, given that the mellow, sweet roasted garlic modulates the harshness of the plain old simmered cloves, and it's just assertive enough, like one of those brassy heroines of an action flick who gives in to the burly male lead in the end anyway. Anyway, Andy and I will probably be exuding garlic from our pores for days to come, but it's worth it.
While I was stirring the coffee into the simple syrup prior to freezing the granita, I thought, "You know what I haven't had in a long time? Chocolate." So I heated the stuff up a bit and stirred in some ground chocolate to make mocha granita, which is doubtless superior to the chocolate-free variety.
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