Part II: Gazpacho
Let me start by apologizing for my horrible photo. I'm not a photographer in any sense of the word. I own a simple point-and-shoot, and I took this at night with horrible lighting. So if the soup looks less than appetizing, I'm sorry! It's delicious and more than worthy of being made and eaten.
With that out of the way, let's talk gazpacho. Cold soup is not for everyone, but to me, nothing is better on a hot summer day than a bowl of cool, delicious gazpacho. When the vegetables are at their peak, there really are few better ways to showcase their deliciousness. I've made all kinds of variations on gazpacho, mostly utilizing tomato juice (low sodium because I like to control the amount of salt added). However, I've experimented with some atypical ingredients and have whirred chinese white radish into a batch of of gazpacho, and made a raw beet gazpacho that is ridiculously amazing. I've made versions with a latin american slant, using lime, cilantro, and chiles. Every which way you can make gazpacho, you can bet I'll love it.
So it stands to reason that staring down a bag full of tomatoes leads me to gazpacho. AND incidentally, seriouseats.com had a recipe for a traditional-ish gazpacho. It turns out that the original recipe for the soup calls for little more than tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, onion, and stale bread to thicken the soup. Alice Waters' version, featured on seriouseats.com, contains some ancho chile for a bit of kick. Although I had some, I was making a small batch and threw in a serrano instead. As you can see from my picture, my end result was much less red than the picture that accompanied the recipe on Serious Eats. I suspect I got the ratio of bread to tomato wrong when I scaled down, since I just eyeballed the whole thing. However, it tasted just fine and I am well-pleased with the results. I have to admit that I'm unlikely to make this version again because I prefer it without the bread giving the soup a starchiness. There's something very light and refreshing about a dish made purely of vegetables and makes me feel like I'm being so healthy to boot, even though I'm sucking down large bowls of it at a time.
While I was in the midst of all this gazpacho making, I was reminded of an idea for a dish that I had been bouncing around in my mind since summer began. I wanted to make a light summer lasagna. It would consist of lasagna noodles, grilled eggplant and zucchini, ricotta, and a raw tomato sauce, all loosely layered. I thought gazpacho would be a great way to make a raw tomato sauce, especially since this Alice Waters' recipe uses no tomato juice, but the addition of the bread gave it too much starch for a dish already containing pasta noodles, and I really want a bright red color to contrast against the other vegetables. So, as crazy as it sounds, when I went to grocery store a few days later, I bought more tomatoes. Yes, MORE tomatoes. I'm completely weird. In my defense, I picked up a different kind of tomato, grape tomatoes, so that I can achieve that bright red color and intense tomato flavor with my raw tomato sauce. So stay tuned, folks, for further tomato insanity to come.
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