A new bowl and a new recipe to fill it

I love the abundance of summer fruits available right now. On the way back from the beach, we stopped at the Pee Dee State Farmer's Market in Florence and loaded up on watermelon and cantelopes. Then we stopped at McLeod's in McBee for a bushel and a half of soft peaches. So with a kitchen full of fresh, ripe fruit and a brand new bowl, gift from a visiting friend (thank you, Val!), I had to come up with a new recipe. I perused Recipezaar and a couple of cooking blogs for ideas, walked around among my herbs, and came up with this...



This new bowl is the perfect color for this soup. The picture was taken after about half of the soup was already gone!

Here's what went into it. Sorry, no exact measurements. I didn't measure anything, as usual. This is another one of those, "I just" recipes. Coty says that when people ask me how I make something, I always reply, "I just..." and then proceed to describe what I did. I guess that's pretty much how I cook. Good ingredients, favorite flavors, imagination, courage, and lots of experimenting. This soup is really one you can't go wrong on, though. If you don't have the fresh herbs around your house, I expect mint is pretty easy to find at the grocery store. The others you can leave out, but the purple basil does lend a lovely lavender color to the "stock."

about half a big watermelon
a big cantelope
8 or so peaches
approximately a cup and a half of purple basil syrup
at least a cup of fresh mint leaves, probably more
about 1/4 cup of fresh lemon verbena leaves
water
lots of lime juice

Just chop all the fruit into bite size pieces, add the basil syrup if you have it, water, lime juice, and herbs, chopped fine. You need to let this chill for awhile so plan accordingly for chill time. I also thought that white grape or apple juice would be nice added to the soup.

A couple of teen girl friends who were here while the soup making was in progress kept saying I should have my own cooking show. That's a new one! One of them thinks my pink, funky reading glasses would be particularly endearing to the audience. Hmmmm??!! A future in food TV - I don't know. But I do know that this soup is making a repeat appearance tonight when our small group comes over for swimming, a potluck dinner, and an evening of Ebenezer stories...but that's a subject for another post. I'm off to the kitchen to cut up the fruit.