Okay... those browsing my cookbook for low fat recipes, please turn away right now. You're on the wrong page!
Coconut is fairly high in fat, as are avocados. But they're both really delicious and you don't have to eat them every day. I say it's good to take a day off from calorie-counting every now and then. And this recipe could easily be a now. Or it could even be a then.
I was inspired to try this soup at home after seeing a similar one in Sri Lanka, in a restaurant in Unawatuna at the south end of the island - a lovely place, if a wee bit pricey. I don't mean just the restaurant with the soup, but the whole village. Sri Lanka is relatively expensive to travel in after India, as tourism isn't so much geared to back-packer trade, but more to well-off tourists who book in advance and hire cars and drivers to get around. Even if you try doing things on the cheap, you soon find that most of your efforts are thwarted due to the deeply ingrained habit of charging visitors up to ten times the local rate for everything. This policy operates from the most casual level right up to the official and it can get you down sometimes. But traveling is all about overcoming such trials and getting the best you can from a place and the encounters you have while exploring it. When you go with the flow, you'll have a great time in Sri Lanka, meet some lovely people and eventually understand how to keep more or less to your budget. That means you have to be careful in places like Unawatuna, but we veggies are off to a good start as the restaurant touts usually concentrate on trying to flog barbecued fish and quickly lose interest in you if you're not interested in their fish. A wander round the back streets, away from the places on the beach with the strings of coloured lights, quickly leads to interesting discoveries like cheap rotties stuffed with lentils and chilli and veggie set meals.
And there are avocados of course. You can buy them at fruit stalls and you'll also find plenty of avocado based snacks. You can even get avocado rotty. A rotty is like a chapatti folded round some kind of sweet or savoury filling and fried on a hot plate. You can never have too many. Even when you think you are full, you'll still be able to squeeze another one in. Avocado shakes are good too. They're made sweet with either milk or (my favourite) young coconut water. As long as there's electricity to work the blender, you can enjoy an avocado shake anytime of the day.
And talking of blenders takes us back to the soup. The offering in the restaurant I mentioned above was a pureed soup and it was very tasty, but I don't have a blender, so I've designed this recipe to work without one, but you might want to try following my recipe to the end then blending the finished result. It'll be good.
I could go on and on about Sri Lanka, but I'll save the rest for another page. Here are a few photos from my last trip if you're interested (there aren't more pics as it rained almost every minute we were there).
Here are the ingredients to make 2 portions of coconut and avocado soup.
1 can (about 400ml) of coconut milk
1 avocado
1 clove of garlic
A half teaspoon of coriander powder
A third of a teaspoon of cumin powder
A small green chilly
A squirt of lemon juice
Salt
A small splash of oil
A few fresh basil and/or coriander leaves
Chop the chilly and garlic and fry for a minute in a very small amount of oil. Stir in the cumin and coriander and add the coconut milk (you can add a glass of water if you want more soup with a thinner consistency).
Prepare the avocado by making six vertical cuts through the fruit to the seed. Peel the strips of skin off first then prise away the segments of avocado from the stone. Chop into pieces and add top the soup.
When the soup comes to the boil, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and add lemon juice and salt to taste and some chopped fresh herbs. It's now ready to serve.
To make a more substantial meal, you could serve your avocado and coconut soup with bowls of steamed rice on the side. Eat by lifting a spoon full of rice and dipping it into the soup.