Watermelon Soup

I wanted to try something new. I had never heard of watermelon soup, but I figured it should be possible. After all, soup can be made of mostly anything. So after a bit of googling and a bit of scrounging in the supermarket & the kitchen cabinets, I came up with this and it tasted great!

Tools:
- cutting board
- some knives
- a little spoon
- a fork (not pictured)
- a wooden spoon (not pictured)
- a soup pan and frying pan (not pictured)
- an immersion blender (not pictured)

Ingredients for two persons:
- 1/2 water melon
- 1 lime
- 1 onion
- 1 avocado
- some assorted nuts (I used almond, hazelnut & pine nuts)
- some olives
- some capers
- 100g feta
- spices: tarragon, dill, paprika (mild or hot to your preference) and black pepper
- salt
- butter, olive oil
- 1 clove of garlic
- bread

Cut the onion very fine and the nuts extremely fine.
Take your skillet and fry them both over low heat in some butter and olive oil.

Cut your half watermelon into pieces and put in a cooking pot over medium heat.

Add:
- juice of a lime
- some chopped olives (I used 6)
- half an avocado
- the sautéed onions with nuts
- pepper, salt, dill, tarragon and paprika

When it has cooked long enough for the watermelon to have released quite a bit of its water (5 to 10 minutes), blend it together with a stick blender. Don't blend too long: you want to keep a few intact pieces of delicious watermelon still in there.

On a flat saucer, combine a largish chunk of soft butter with a dollop of olive oil, a clove of garlic (finely chopped (two cloves are pictured but that was a bit too ambitious for this amount of butter)), some salt, black pepper, paprika, dill and tarragon. Mash together with a fork and taste to see if it needs more of any ingredient.

Bake your bread (if you buy "bake off", like I do)

Chop up the feta and some more olives, spoon out the other half of the avocado and add some capers.
Serve soup in soup bowls and add feta/avocado mixture on top.

We ate the soup lukewarm, which suited our moods and the weather, but it can be eaten hot or cold as well, whichever you like. The soup is rich, warm and soft in taste; we loved it!
The garlic butter is a bit more piquant, especially because of the raw garlic. Personally I think herb butter can be made with any herbs you fancy, as long as you use real butter and the right amount of salt.

I would have used the contest's challenge ingredient, chervil, in both the soup and the garlic butter, but our supermarket was fresh out of it. It would have been lovely with both, I'm sure of it. Instead I used tarragon, which isn't too far away from it, taste-wise.