her able hands

I haven’t eaten a single local peach this summer.

I’m just saying.

Geeze-oh-man, the weather alarmists are way off base for our zip-pity-do-dah the past two days. It’s been hot, muggy, still (except for yesterday when a stiff breeze blew over my 7′ tall patch of Matt’s Wild Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes). Usually when we get a forecast of 70% chance of thunderstorms, we get some good rainfall. So far we’ve heard some nice, slow rumbly thunder, but nary a drop of rain for our poor, parched patch of the planet. Ah, well. I should have gone out there and watered this morning, for surely then it would have poured.

Instead, I picked the ripe tomatoes so they wouldn’t split wide open if it did rain, then trudged back inside in the thick, soupy air to do some much-needed, long-overdue deep cleaning. Gawd, my house has gotten gross this summer. After about an hour or so, the kitchen looked much more pleasant to work in, so I wondered what I could make that would quickly destroy the spit shine and settled on Gazpacho.

So how’s about this time I provide y’all with an actual recipe, instead of making you try to mine it from my rambling prose? This is my version, ganked from several other versions and varying wildly depending upon what all the veggies taste like coming out of the garden that season. This year, methinks they’re perfect.

Kelly’s Damn Gorgeous Gazpacho

3 Bell Peppers (1 green, 1 red, 1 orange–okay, the orange was from the grocery store)
2 Slicing Cucumbers–seeded, or 4 or 5 small Pickling Cucumbers, or a combination thereof–yielding about 3 cups cucumber bits
8-10 Plum tomatoes of some sort–seeded–this batch I used mostly San Marzano and two big, ox heart shaped Amish Paste
1 medium onion–red is preferred, but I used yellow and it’s tasting good
1 small hot pepper of your choice
1 small stalk of celery– whole stalk if thin, half if super-fat
4-5 cups tomato juice (depends on how thin you like it, I do 4)
4 large cloves of F R E S H hardneck garlic
1 Tbsp. kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp. cracked pepper
1/2 cup White Wine Vinegar
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

So you start off by chopping all of the veggies into 1-inch dice and then, one vegetable at a time, pulsing them in a food processor with a blade until they’re coarse. I don’t think it really matters what order you do this in, but it’s imperative that you start with very ripe tomatoes.

I chopped my peppers and onions first and dumped them out into the largest of my glass nesting bowls. Remind me sometime to do a post about my bowls, will ya? I have a lot of bowls and every one of them is special to me in some way.

So now you’re adding the veggies one at a time to the bowl and your kitchen is starting to fill with the fumes from the onions and peppers, and with a sharp, green and cool fragrance from the cucumbers.

I used a mix of one slicing cuke from the farmers’ market and three smallish Boston Pickling cukes from my garden. If they’re organically grown, I leave the skin on, but don’t forget to slice the seeds out, you really don’t want those floating around in the mix.

Next came the tomatoes and then the short stalk of celery. A lot of recipes don’t call for celery, and I’ve tried some that use way too much. I love just a hint of celery flavor, it shouldn’t overpower. The tomato should take center stage.

Now you’ve got a great big bowl of freshness and it’s time to add the remaining ingredients, the most important being the garlic. If you haven’t got any fresh hardneck garlic from a local farmer, well… I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. Except maybe skip the garlic, because the rancid crap they try to sell as garlic at the grocery store just shouldn’t ever be added to any dish you might want to take pride in. It’s disgusting. Sorry to be so blunt and mean, but it’s true.

So while there’s still time, get thee to a farmers’ market and buy up a buttload of hardneck garlic. This bulb is Music, a sweet and delicious variety—super-juicy and garlic-tastic! Mince it up as fine as you can, then fold it into the veggies. Add the olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, then the parsley and cilantro.

Last comes the tomato juice. I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling pretty damned lucky right now. Want to know why? Well, let me tell you. It’s because of the fact that I made a little trip down to the dungeon (a.k.a. basement), and what did I spy right there gathering dust on my dwindling pantry shelf? I found a jar of thin tomato sauce—improperly labeled, because really? It’s tomato juice. My very own tomato juice from my most amazing garden two summers ago.

I got to crack that jar open almost exactly two years to the day—the label read 9/4/05—and swirl it gently into the bowl of vegetables, thus taking it from the level of a loose salad to a cool summery soup.

My fridge is a bit packed right now and I didn’t have enough room for such a big bowl, so I dumped it into a pitcher and the quart jar the juice came out of so it can sit in the cold overnight. You can eat it after a few hours if you don’t have the patience to wait, but it’s much better if you let all of the ingredients mingle and get to know one another overnight. It’s a fuller, sexier soup the next day.

And a fuller sexier soup is just the thing on a hot September day, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: recipes, gazpacho, tomatoes, eat local, locavore, organic gardening

Bookmark It