Recipe Korner -- we're havin' a heat wave edition
It's 90 degrees F at 9:46 p.m. here in beautiful Baltimore. I spent the day inside, soaking up the AC and making gazpacho.
Clean Out Yer Fridge Gazpacho
48 oz bottle low sodium V8 juice
6 oz can tomato paste
1 pint grape tomatoes
1 large carrot
2 large green peppers
6 lil baby Persian (or Israeli) cucumbers
3 or 4 garlic scapes
half a large Vidalia onion
1/2 lb frozen corn kernels, thawed
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can chick peas, drained and rinsed
a couple sprigs fresh oregano
2 or 3 T red wine vinegar
2 or 3 T lime juice
black pepper
a few splorts Crystal hot sauce
Mix the tomato paste with the V8 juice until smooth. Pulse everything else except the beans, corn, and seasonings in a food processor until very finely chopped. Mix into the V8, along with the corn and beans. Add the seasonings and mix again. Chill for a couple hours before serving.
I admit that I did buy the V8, the peppers, and the onion with gazpacho in mind, but everything else was stuff we already had in the house.
We ate it for dinner with some cold boiled potatoes left over from yesterday. Yummity yum yum.
In this recipe I used two recently discovered vegetables, garlic scapes and Persian cucumbers.
Garlic scapes, as I learned a week ago, are the curly young green stalks of hard-stemmed garlic. You're supposed to cut them off in order to direct the plant's energy to making the garlic bulb. I've never seen them in a store or even the farmer's market, but they were included in last week's pick up from our CSA. When I searched the Web for recipes, nearly every post I found mentioned getting them from a CSA (and the exception picked them from his own garden). They smell pretty strongly of garlic, but the flavor is much more mild. I threw some into a tofu scramble last week, and they were yummy cooked -- green and tender, with a texture somewhere between spinach stems and asparagus stalks. Today the rest of them went into the gazpacho. I thought the raw flavor would be stronger, but it's still pretty mild. Oh, and LC is obsessed with them. He is the weirdest cat ever.
I discovered Persian cucumbers on a recent visit to my mom. They look sort of like a cross between zucchini and those English cucumbers that come individually shrink wrapped, but they're small, maybe 6 inches long. My mom served them peeled, but today we discovered that the peel is not bitter at all (and it didn't appear to have been waxed), so I left it on. I've only seen them at one store here so far, and it's a bit of a shlep, so I don't know if we'll be eating them often. They are much more reliably delicious than the big standard supermarket cucumbers.
Clean Out Yer Fridge Gazpacho
48 oz bottle low sodium V8 juice
6 oz can tomato paste
1 pint grape tomatoes
1 large carrot
2 large green peppers
6 lil baby Persian (or Israeli) cucumbers
3 or 4 garlic scapes
half a large Vidalia onion
1/2 lb frozen corn kernels, thawed
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can chick peas, drained and rinsed
a couple sprigs fresh oregano
2 or 3 T red wine vinegar
2 or 3 T lime juice
black pepper
a few splorts Crystal hot sauce
Mix the tomato paste with the V8 juice until smooth. Pulse everything else except the beans, corn, and seasonings in a food processor until very finely chopped. Mix into the V8, along with the corn and beans. Add the seasonings and mix again. Chill for a couple hours before serving.
I admit that I did buy the V8, the peppers, and the onion with gazpacho in mind, but everything else was stuff we already had in the house.
We ate it for dinner with some cold boiled potatoes left over from yesterday. Yummity yum yum.
In this recipe I used two recently discovered vegetables, garlic scapes and Persian cucumbers.
Garlic scapes, as I learned a week ago, are the curly young green stalks of hard-stemmed garlic. You're supposed to cut them off in order to direct the plant's energy to making the garlic bulb. I've never seen them in a store or even the farmer's market, but they were included in last week's pick up from our CSA. When I searched the Web for recipes, nearly every post I found mentioned getting them from a CSA (and the exception picked them from his own garden). They smell pretty strongly of garlic, but the flavor is much more mild. I threw some into a tofu scramble last week, and they were yummy cooked -- green and tender, with a texture somewhere between spinach stems and asparagus stalks. Today the rest of them went into the gazpacho. I thought the raw flavor would be stronger, but it's still pretty mild. Oh, and LC is obsessed with them. He is the weirdest cat ever.
I discovered Persian cucumbers on a recent visit to my mom. They look sort of like a cross between zucchini and those English cucumbers that come individually shrink wrapped, but they're small, maybe 6 inches long. My mom served them peeled, but today we discovered that the peel is not bitter at all (and it didn't appear to have been waxed), so I left it on. I've only seen them at one store here so far, and it's a bit of a shlep, so I don't know if we'll be eating them often. They are much more reliably delicious than the big standard supermarket cucumbers.