Okay, so a few days ago, I was having lunch with my mother in the city, and she asked me if I wanted to make dinner that night. I agreed, having absolutely no idea what to do at first, but then came up with the brilliant idea of making Gazpacho; A tomato soup that is supposed to be served cold.
Knowing only that, I did some research on how to make the soup, and it turns out that there are several versions of it. As I wasn't familiar with making either of them, I went with the traditional Gazpacho, which is what I will be sharing with you today (tonight). By the way, I'll be using the metric system, but as I know that not everyone in the world uses deciliter and such, I'll put ounces and whatever else in parenthesis behind it.
Gazpacho (should take about ½ an hour at the most, if you're not like me and do 127 other things while making dinner. If you're like me, you'll have to add some time. Also, a mother who keeps coming in, asking if you're going to boil it every 10 minutes is not that beneficial either.)
- 3 dl bread (about 10 oz)
- 6 dl tomatoes (approximately 20 oz then. For all of you who are good at maths, you can see that both these numbers have multiplied by 2)
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 2 onions
- 2 red and green peppers (I highly doubt that they have to be red and green. Sure, the green and red peppers taste a little different, but go ahead and use orange or yellow peppers if you prefer that, or why not use white peppers? That would be interesting... I have no idea what white peppers taste like)
- 1 optional cucumber.
- 7 tablespoons of oil (I used canola oil)
- 2 tablespoons of vinegar (I used Apple Cider vinegar)
- 1½ tablespoon of water (I used a mix of water and ice so it became a bit more than this, but it didn't matter)
- Cumin (optional as well, but it adds a bit of spice to it
Before I start with anything else, I want to let you know that there was either a growth spurt of the vegetables and flavors on the way home from the store or my mother managed to find the biggest vegetables in the whole store. I don't know how she did it, but in one go, I saw the largest tomato I've ever seen (that wasn't supposed to be big, like a beef tomato), a huge clove of garlic, an enormous onion and the fattest cucumber I've seen in a long time. I think the only thing that was normal sized was the peppers. Okay, now I've kept you long enough with my rambling, but I just wanted to share this in case you were wondering what happened with the two cloves of garlic and 2 onions or something.
To do this, you need a mortar or something similar to it.
1. First you soak the bread in some water (not the 1½ tablespoons of water. You'll need that later). To do this, and especially if you're under time pressure, I just put the bread in a bowl with water and pressed out all of the air from the bread and let it absorb the water instead.
4. Pour the water (or water/ice combo, or maybe even just ice. Using ice makes the cooling process shorter) in to the mixture. I wouldn't care so much with the measurements here. Just go with your instincts, and remember; it's better to use to little as you can always add more later, depending on personal taste. Pour in the oil and vinegar along with the water and mix a bit again. Chop the decoration vegetables; cucumber (I peeled the cucumber, but that's optional too), peppers and tomato (the rest of the vegetables go in the actual soup) if you have used the ice in the soup. Otherwise, refrigerate the soup and chop the vegetables right before serving. Remember that the soup is supposed to be cold when you serve it!
That's it. It's pretty easy and doesn't take long to do, so there you have it!
I'm off to bed now because I only got a maximum of 2 hours sleep last night (due to prom) and it's past midnight and I'm getting yelled at by mother. Not fun....
