Summer

In a few days I’ll be hopping on another plane to a place that promises lots of good food, relaxation, sunshine and wine. It’s a trip we’ve been planning for a while, but what I wasn’t planning on was real life enveloping the weeks before and after this excursion. In this case real life means work, and work means travel, and that means I’ll be up in the air and away from home for many weeks. When I return it will no longer be summer but early fall and I can’t help but feel slightly Rip Van Winkelish about the whole damn thing.

I’ve managed to cram quite a bit of summer in the past few weeks. Dinners outdoors with best friends, long walks in the muggy streets of NYC with my blogging family, even one last hurrah at our house just the other night dedicated to the bounty of figs. Summer is my favorite season and I just don’t like to see it ending, footstomp footstomp footstomp!

As a symbolic gesture I picked up stone fruit at the farmers’ market the other day, knowing that it could very likely be the last peach or plum I would buy and cook with at home for some time. Of course I’m looking forward to what’s around the corner but saying goodbye to stone fruit always leaves me a bit melancholy.

Gazpacho, what a perfect name for a chilled soup. Ever since hearing of the exotic "gazpacho," I have been intrigued and perplexed by its very foreign name. I came to learn that the soup's roots lie in Andalusia in the southern region of Spain. Gazpacho originated as a cold soup of stale bread, garlic, oil, and vinegar. Once tomatoes were brought from the New World and added to the traditional recipe, the summertime soup became even more refreshing. Over the years the soup has transformed, sometimes omitting bread, and in some tomato-less variations including almonds, cucumbers, and grapes. When I tried gazpacho for the first time, I realized what I had been missing and what I had misconstrued as foreignness was just my lack of knowing how incredibly simple it is to make.

With no cooking involved, all that is needed are fresh vegetables, a good sharp knife, and a blender. I've attempted to make gazpacho before but haven't always been successful with achieving the right vegetable combination or the texture. It's entirely about having that just-so touch witth the blender.

Has this ever happened to you? You're strolling through the farmers' market on a balmy August day when you spy a table heavy with heirloom tomatoes.

There's a youthful, striped Green Zebra sitting next to a grandfatherly, bulbous Cherokee tomato the color of red wine. You scoop up a couple of each. Your mind is swimming with juicy possibilities -- tomato and mozzarella salad, tomato and goat cheese tart.

As you're walking toward the farmer to pay for your tomatoes, you spot a perfectly scalloped white patty pan squash. You've never seen a white squash before, so you select three. Then the farmer points out his captivating purple string beans. You say you'll buy a pound of those too. No one passes up purple string beans.

You hand your heavy sacks to the farmer who weighs them and says, "That'll be $28 dollars, please."

You blanch. You only have $20 left in your wallet. What do you do?

And I’d say, “Yech.”Or at least I used to. I’m not sure when the exact transition from terrible to tantilizing took place, but I can assure you it’s a food miracle. As a child, if any part of a raw tomato touched my plate, I couldn’t eat the item on it. The pulpy, soft texture, the runny pink juice – don’t even get me started about the seeds – was all like garlic to a vampire. The only thing that was (and still is) worse – the pickle.  (How could they do that to the cool deliciousness of the cucumber?)  But, I digress. You seriously could have tortured me by forcing me to take a bite out of one. I would have given up every secret I had before I ever put one in my mouth.

The tomato was my friend as long as it was cooked. Pizza, spaghetti, even salsa (I know it’s raw, but spices count for a lot) was enjoyed with pleasure.  Gradually as I made my way into the world I became more embarrassed by my food quirks and stopped picking them out of things. If I could order something without the tomato, say a sandwich, I would. Though I didn’t like it I hated wasting a “perfectly good” slice I wasn’t going to eat.  However, as I became more and more addicted to big, bountiful salads – inevitable for anyone who moves to California where there’s fresh produce year-round – I found leaving the tomato out was a much harder request.