There was a lot of peeling and chopping and dicing and pulsing in my kitchen this afternoon. And laughing and wondering, too. My neighbor, Carol, came over to assist me with a recipe for a soup she’d never heard of and one I’d never attempted. After all, it was Nyel’s recipe and he, of course, was the chef extraordinaire of the household.
Gazpacho! It’s a spicy soup that is usually made from chopped raw vegetables (such as tomato, onion, pepper, and cucumber) and is served cold. Year in and year out, I never think of it — until the weather turns hot and my taste buds get to hankerin’… Plus, there is no such thing as making “a little” gazpacho as far as I know. So with house guests coming for a weekend which promises to be sunny (and maybe still hot), I got out Nyel’s recipe box and… voila! (Almost.)
The problem as I (the non-cook of the family) saw it, was that the “recipe” was simply a list of ingredients with their amounts and a one-word direction saying “pulse.” So, I called Carol. “Do you have a food processor?” she asked. “Maybe…” was my unsatisfactory answer, “but I’m not sure where it might be.”
She realized way before I did how hopeless things were and she said, I’ll bring mine over and we’ll make the recipe together. Which we did, though it was mostly Carol. “Do you think the cucumber (or tomato or red bell pepper) chunks should be bigger than this?” she would ask. “Well, I’ve seen them bigger… but I’ve also seen gazpacho that is completely smooth,” was my less-than-helpful answer. And then we’d laugh some more.
End result: it looks beautiful; it tastes terrific; by Friday night dinner it will have blended to perfection! (At least, I hope so.) Bless Carol! Bless Nyel! And bless whoever “invented” gazpacho. In fact, gazpacho predates the 16th century arrival of tomatoes (and peppers) in Europe; most culinary historians say that its roots go back to Islamic Spain, sometime between the 8th and 13th centuries. So there you have it!