Heatwave Dining

So I have two cooking problems this week:

1. I'm trying to lose a few pounds, so nothing with too many calories
2. Its WAY too hot to cook!

My solution? A delicious, tasty, chilled soup. I was introduced to chilled soups by Marc, although he tended to prefer the fruit ones. I prefer the more savoury ones.

This soup is terrific. It tastes good, and even better, you don't have to turn on your stove. There's a little chopping, but there's a few shortcuts as well - namely, the use of Mott's Clamato as a soup base and the purchase of a bag of President's Choice cooked shrimp. About the Clamato - I discovered today it now comes in three flavours: Extra Spicy, All Dressed (or something), and Original. I think any of them would be good for this soup, but I chose Original because Ilike to deal with the spicing myself. For shrimp, I picked 16/21's. They are a nice robust size, so they are nice and shrimpy when you bite into them. And they were on sale for $6.49 a pound!

And tomatoes. I recommend Roma tomatoes for anything where you want to seed the tomatoes raw. For this soup you don't take the skins off. Just quarter them lengthwise and scoop out the seeds before chopping.

Ingredients

4 cups Motts's Clamato.
1 or 2 one-pound bags PC cooked shrimp; they don't have to be entirely thawed, but they shouldn't be frozen solid.
2 avocados, peeled and chopped. The avos shouldn't be too soft. You don't want them crunchy, but you want them to keep their shape after they are chopped.
1 cucumbers, seeds removed, cubed
3 roma tomatoes, diced
1/2 red onion, diced
1 bunch of basil, chopped
Up to 1/4 cup of lemon juice (to taste)
Several good shakes of salt (you need less than you might think - the Clamato is already pretty salty.)
A few twists of the pepper mill.
Tabasco to taste

Directions

In a large bowl, combine combine everything except the lemon juice and tobasco.
Taste it. Add lemon juice and tobasco until it tastes really, really yummy!
Chill thoroughly in the fridge. Tastes best if you leave it over night.