Chilled Cucumber Soup with Yoghurt and Mint

There are three or four days a year in this country when the kitchen is too hot to cook in. You know the ones. The windows are open and it makes no difference. The butter has gone soft on the counter. The cat has found the one cool tile in the house and isn't moving. On those days, this is what I make.

It isn't really cooking. A cucumber, some yoghurt, a handful of mint from the pot by the back door, everything into the blender and then into the fridge. Fifteen minutes of work, most of it washing up. But the result is something genuinely worth eating: cold, clean, sharp with lemon, and so green it looks like you tried harder than you did.

The cucumber does the work. A good one, firm and cool and smelling of rain, is all this soup needs to be. The yoghurt gives it body, the mint lifts it, and the olive oil at the end rounds everything into something that feels like a proper bowl of food rather than a drink. I wrote it down in the notebook last July: cucumber soup, garden mint, too hot to think. That was the whole entry. It was enough.

We're only making dinner. Or lunch, really. This is a lunchtime soup, I think, eaten at the kitchen table with the back door open and nothing particular planned for the afternoon.