It took long enough, but it's finally summer in New York. After an extremely stormy month of June that didn't seem to realize when it became July, we've recently had a batch of perfect, sunny-with-a slight-breeze 80-degree days. This is my ideal climate.
Hot weather makes me reluctant to eat anything remotely warm, so I've been thinking up a lot of cold recipes - potato salads, cabbage slaws, rice salads, Mediterranean couscous salads...I haven't branched out from salads too much. But walking to Red Hook the other day I heard some Reggaeton blasting from somewhere inside a community garden, and was reminded of the summer I spent in Paris living with two avid Reggaeton listeners from Puerto Rico and Guatemala, and subsisting primarily on bottles of gazpacho purchased at Monoprix. Gazpacho is such a natural summer dish, I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it sooner.
If I still lived near a Monoprix, I could have picked up some more bottles of the stuff and studied its flavor to try to recreate it at home (since that summer, I've figured out that Monoprix is not cheap when you convert to dollars, and though their prepared foods are delicious you're much better off making your own). Gazpacho is so refreshing on a hot day that I've always thought of its flavor as something of ingenious complexity: the sweet roundness of the tomato balanced with acidity and herby savoriness. I hate the phrase "hits the spot," but it's been exactly what I've wanted to eat on so many summer days; its perfection intimidated me and I assumed I could never make it myself.
It turns out it's pretty easy. I didn't even use a recipe. I put a diced beefsteak tomato in a blender with about half of a cucumber, a carton of diced tomatoes, the juice of two limes, a quarter of a sweet yellow onion, and a minced clove of garlic. I added red wine vinegar to taste, maybe about a quarter of a cup in the end, and seasoned it with a little salt. As an afterthought I chopped a few leaves of basil and stirred them in.
I put the mixture in the fridge to chill for a while, and we ended up having it for lunch the next day. It thickened up a bit overnight, but I still decided to add some chunks of tomato and cucumber that I had reserved, and stuck in a few avocado slices (because avocado makes everything better). In its ancient Roman and Moorish incarnations, gazpacho was made entirely of stale bread, oil, garlic, and vinegar, and although I think the introduction of vegetables makes the dish much more appealing (and less reminiscent of trying to make dinner out of condiments in the perennially under-stocked kitchen of my childhood), I made sure to have some freshly baked rolls on hand to dip in the pungent tomato pulp. It was also good with crushed corn tortilla chips sprinkled over the top.
Stay tuned for more summer-y Spanish recipes that begin with “s”: seviche and sangria are next on my list of ways to pretend I live in Andalusia, Guatemala, or Barcelona (it’s easier to just eat the food than choose a location).
Tomato Cucumber Gazpacho
1 26-ounce carton of diced tomatoes
1 beefsteak tomato, diced
half of one seedless cucumber, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
the juice of two limes
1 quarter of a yellow onion, diced
1 quarter cup of red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon chopped basil
Put first six ingredients in a blender and puree until smooth. Add salt and vinegar, adjust amounts to taste. Stir in basil. Refrigerate until sufficiently chilled or ready to serve. Pour into bowls and add extra vegetables, if using. Other possible garnishes: tortilla chips, a drizzle of olive oil, alfalfa sprouts….
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