Gazpacho

Ingredients:
- ~7 tomatoes
- 1 purple onion
- 1 red bell pepper (I used orange)
- 1 hot pepper, seeds removed
- 2 cucumbers, peeled
- 4 cloves of garlic
- Fresh basil
- Fresh parsley
- 1/3 C red wine vinegar
- 1/3 C EVOO, the best you can get
- Juice of one lime (you can substitute a lemon or storebought lemon juice if necessary, but I love the lime)
- fresh ground pepper
- ~1 T kosher salt
- ~2 t cumin (optional)

Directions:

I had a lot of tomatoes to use up (doesn't everyone right now?), and a friend on facebook posted about gazpacho, which reminded me how we had liked it when my husband made it last year, and so I made some. Last summer when the hubs made it, I wasn't even home, so this totally counts for being my first time making it. I didn't get his help at all, and did it all by myself! The only thing he did was toast some bread, which is the totally perfect and necessary complement to gazpacho - really good, crusty bread.

First I read over some recipes online.

Then I bought a few necessary ingredients that I didn't have on hand (orange bell pepper (to add color other than red), purple onion, parsley). Then I got to work.

This recipe requires no cooking, but it's still a pretty hefty workload. I decided to be a bit lazy and use my mini-food processor attachment to my stick blender so that I didn't have to worry about finely chopping anything. It worked out very well; in fact, when he had his first bite, my hubby commented that the texture was wonderful, right after he said how delicious and perfect it was.

So basically I just roughly chunked stuff up and popped it into the processor in manageable batches. For the less juicy stuff, I added a tablespoon or two of the red wine vinegar or EVOO to keep things moving in the blender. And to imitate the other recipes' advice to only blend part of the resulting mix, I tried to leave some batches of each veggie a little chunkier while making sure other batches were fairly smooth. I even put the basil and parsley in a batch with the garlic and some EVOO, so there was really as little chopping as I could wrangle.

I dumped everything into a big glass bowl that I have a lid for, and once it was all in there I added a generous amount of salt (because tomatoes love salt!), some freshly ground cumin (the hubby's fav spice, and I think it is indispensable here), and many grinds of the pepper mill. If you don't love cumin enough to grind it fresh like we do, you might even want to add extra, because it is seriously the perfect je ne sais quoi that takes this over the top.

Since there's no other fat in the whole thing, I didn't feel remotely guilty about the 1/3 cup of EVOO. It gives just enough richness to make this very veggie cold soup taste like a meal and not just like watery salsa. Grab a few slices of your favorite crusty bread and dig in!

One recipe mentioned avocado, and while I didn't want to experiment that much with my first try, I love avocado, so I bought one and included it sliced up with the bread as part of the side dish. The bites where I put a piece of avocado onto the bread and ate it all at once with the soup? Transcendent. This was one seriously delicious dinner. I never once thought to myself "it's weird to be eating completely raw, room temperature food for dinner."

Since all the recipes say to let it sit overnight in the fridge, or at least for an hour, I was expecting it to be even better today for lunch, and it was! So don't hesitate to make enough to last for a few days. You won't regret it, and your overflowing supply of tomatoes will thank you!

Was the recipe easy to follow? Yes, especially since there were no cooking times or temperatures to worry about!
Did it taste good? Um, yes.
Would you make it again? Yup!