Oven-hot is the only way to describe the weather when it gets to the 30 somethings. Housework gets relegated to 7am or midnight. Or in a Quentin Crisp sort of way, not at all.  (“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”). As for cooking, suddenly those frozen ready meals don’t seem such a bad idea. All you can face at midday are salads, sandwiches, water-melon …. and gazpacho.

What a wonderful and necessary invention! So simple, nutritious and refreshing – just what you body needs. And if you whiz up all the ingredients at 7am or midnight no hassle at all to make.

Photo: www.notesfromspain.com

So, how do you make this quintessential Spanish summer dish? How long is the proverbial piece of string? No-one, absolutely no-one, makes gazpacho in the same way and no two gazpachos ever taste the same. Everyone uses a slightly different method and uses a slightly different selection of ingredients. You may start off with the recipe your abuela gave you or that you sneakily ripped out of  Hola! at the hairdresser’s, but you soon end up with your own unique variation.

The basic ingredients are tomatoes, stale bread, olive oil, garlic, vinegar, water and salt. Optional vegetables are cucumber, green pepper, red pepper and onion. Some people leave out the bread; others – me included – substitute the bread with carrot. For what it’s worth in the grand scheme of gazpachos, mine goes like this:

1. Place 5 or 6 ripe tomatoes in boiling water so the skins come off easily.
2. Roughly chop the tomatoes, one small cucumber, one long skinny green pepper, and one clove of garlic.
3. Throw in a carrot or a tiny slice of stale bread soaked in water.
4. Whiz all veggies up in the minipimer (hand blender).
5. Add a good chorro (slug) of olive oil and white wine vinegar.
6. Add salt and a teaspoon of cumin (my ‘secret’ ingredient) to taste.
7. Dilute with cold water from the fridge (even the cold tap runs hot in summer …) till it’s as runny or thick as you like.
8. Garnish with chopped tomato, cucumber, onion, pepper.
9. Or if it’s really, really hot and chopping vegetables seems like a task of Herculean proportions, cut out the middle man (bowl and spoon) and slug directly from the Tupperware thingy.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.