Adapting: Dairy-Free Cucumber Soup

One of my favorite spring/summertime meals is cucumber soup. It's a family food tradition, and, thanks to my mom, it's also the first recipe I ever learned to make on my own.

One problem with the cucumber soup recipe I've been making all my life is that it calls for sour cream. Since I've given up dairy, I was facing the prospect of a life without cucumber soup, and that was just not a life I wanted to live.

So I decided to experiment with omitting dairy from my favoritest soup in the whole wide world, and I actually managed to come up with a great alternative.

Dairy-Free Cucumber Soup

• 3 cucumbers, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks
  
• 1/4-1/2 of a small Vidalia onion, chopped
• 2 cups vegetable stock
  
• 1/2 cup fresh dill, roughly chopped
  
• Juice of 1/2 a lemon
• Salt and pepper to taste
  

1. In a food processor, combine the cucumbers, onion, vegetable stock, dill, and lemon juice and blend until smooth.

2. Adjust seasoning to taste, adding more or less water depending on how thin you want to soup to be.

One note of warning: be sparing with the onion. I added half of a very large Vidalia onion to my test batch, and had onion breath for about 24 hours. If you like onion taste and have lots of gum on hand, adding a whole half makes for great flavor. But if, like me, you're a teacher and you're paranoid about having teacher breath, a quarter of an onion is plenty.

This soup is so simple to make, and the lemon juice gives it a really nice fresh taste. While I still prefer the sour cream version, I have to admit that this one is pretty good, too.