The Daily Tannenbaum

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Lisa becomes a vegetarian? Specifically the part where she gets laughed at for serving ice cold tomato soup at Homer’s barbecue? That’s Gazpacho for you, the much maligned icon of the vegetarian diet that nobody really loves.

When I was thirteen, I came home from summer camp and told my dad that I was going to be a vegetarian from then on. “Well,” he said, this look of pity in his eyes, “you better like Gazpacho, then.” Then he told me about ice-cold tomato soup, evidently the only thing he could think of that vegetarians ate. He made it sound so gross that I held of on vegetarianism for another seven years.  But that was a sort of outdated concept of a vegetarian diet.  There’s so much more veggie variety these days, and I don’t think I’ve had Gazpacho more than but once or twice in the past ten years.

So since the WIU theme this week is “vegetarian” and since I decided to only do vegan recipes for WIU, it seemed like the perfect time to give Gazpacho a shot so I could decide if it is really hot or not.

Gazpacho is a lot like salsa or potato salad in that there are about a million ways you can make it, as long as you have the base ingredients in place. I took the inspiration for this recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which was the only vegetarian cookbook among the 5 or 6 that I own that even had a recipe for Gazpacho. I guess you can say that this iconic soup is on the outs now that we vegetarians have so many other options for sustaining life without eating meat.  But here goes…

GAZPACHO

Serves one, three times

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 lbs tomatoes, coarsely chopped
• one cucumber, coarsely chopped
• 2 slices day-old bread, crusts removed
• 1/4 cup virgin olive oil
• 1 Hungarian hot pepper
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 cup water
• salt & pepper to taste
• lime to garnish

METHOD:

Wash & cut all the vegetables and feed into a food processor. Process until all vegetables are fully processed. But! If you want to do it right, you’re going to need a bigger food processor than the one pictured, because it took three rounds of food processing to get all those vegetables in there. Serve immediately, over ice.  (Do you like the way I put the layer of ice between two dishes?)

Goes great with a Coronoa (it actually did, I was out of all the other crappy beer.) Also goes well with corn or anything else golden you have lying around. (I like to put cinnamon and butter on my corn.)

The questions, always with the questions!

Was the recipe easy to follow?
Oh yes, completely. The Bittman book is great because it gives you suggestions and sets you down a path, but it also guides you in ways that you can improvise recipes to your own tastes. So I had the basic recipe and then I kind of played around with it so that I could make it spicier without adding raw onions, which would be bad, bad, bad for me. But maybe good for you? The biggest problem was that all the stuff didn’t fit into the food processor at one time. It made quite a mess for a recipe that should be pretty simple.

Did the dish taste good?
It did! If I make it again, however, this is what I would change, besides getting a bigger food processor: I’d use 3 slices of day-old bread instead of two, and I would use more substantial or crusty bread. The soup was a little thin. Also, I think I’d use ice cubes instead of a cup of water, because that would maybe give me a smoothie-like texture which might be nice. Also, it could stand to be a little spicier. Maybe a dash of Tabasco would have topped it off nicely.

Would you make it again?
I think I would. Maybe I could use my blender instead of the food processor and fit it all in. It’s the perfect recipe to serve at a 70′s themed party if you want to make an authentic 70′s style vegetarian meal. They didn’t have Boca burgers back then, you know. Probably compliments fondue quite nicely.