Very Green Soup and Shrimp Salad with Kiwi and Cucumber

Time for new light and healthy dishes!!

We have an abundance of kiwis in the apartment right now, so I did a little recipe search to find some new ways to use them. One of the first things to come up was a recipe for sauteed scallops with cucumber and kiwi. It was dressed with an Asian soy sauce-based sauce and it seemed like it would be good, so I decided to try it. While shopping for my ingredients I found it difficult to find scallops (there were none to be found, fresh or frozen), so I decided to substitute some frozen shrimp I saw. The second item I substituted was the Bonito stock the recipe calls for; I couldn't find it and instead used some fish stock granules. I think Bonito is essentially fish stock, so it was probably a reasonable substitution. The recipe has you saute the seafood while you gently heat the sauce ingredients: the "Bonito" (or other fish-flavored product), soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a tiny bit of sugar, and salt. When the seafood is cooked, you place it upon a bed of sliced cucumbers and mashed kiwi (although I did not mash my kiwi; I thought it would be so much prettier sliced) and spoon a bit of the sauce over the dish. I also added a bit of caviar as a garnish (an idea I stole from Georg's mom).

Overall, the salad was pretty good--I really liked the dressing and the fresh taste of the kiwi and cucumbers. I do think it would have been better with scallops, and if not scallops, at least really high-quality shrimp. Sometimes I go overboard with being cheap and get ingredients that don't allow the food to reach its full potential, which is no good. I wish I would have spent 3 or 4 or even 5 more euro on some decent jumbo shrimp; if I had this would have been perfect. So if you, for some reason (I know it's kind of wild), decide to make this, use good seafood.
I've been wanting to make this "very green" soup for a while...I saw it on the Food Network website; it is a recipe of Michael Chiarello's. I love how it is called "very green" soup...the name immediately caught my attention. Not just green soup, very green. The soup is made of broccoli, celery, garlic, onion, and spinach which is combined with chicken stock, thyme, lemon zest and cream and blended. As we all know, Georgie cannot eat onions or celery, so I substituted the cup of chopped onions and half-cup of celery for 1 1/2 cups of celeriac. I also used buttermilk again instead of cream to make the soup lighter.

The soup was very good in my opinion...it was so light and I couldn't help but be delighted that I was eating something so good for me. Don't forget the thyme, because I tasted the soup before and after I added it, and it makes a big difference. I also added a few grounds of red pepper flakes, which gave the soup a very enjoyable yet subtle hint of spiciness.