I wanted to make a grape and garlic soup. Well, I was plum out of garlic, try again. I reached for some onions instead. The initial idea, the spark for the soup was the thought of pressure cooking garlic in balsamic vinegar. I thought an intense purple garlic puree would be amazing. I still have plans to travel that road, once I get my hands on some garlic.
For now, I had to settle. And it was a good thing. We took some onions, some grapes, some saba a bit of red wine vinegar (saving the balsamic for the garlic) and some salt and let the pressure cooker do its thing. When the cooking was done we simply pureed the ingredients and the result was a silky sweet, tangy allium tinged soup.
As far as accompaniments for the soup I wanted to use our shrimp terrine. In today's preparation I sliced the
terrine and then pressed it back together so that when eating the soup the diner could break the terrine into bites. We also used lovage puree to balance the richness of the soup. Our green grape olives punctuated the dish and some leaves of anise hyssop provide bright sweet licorice notes.
