Warm weather eatin'

Finished,
originally uploaded by gaffentine.

Yesterday being as warm and sunny as it was, I made an unscheduled trip to the store to stock up on the key ingredients for our favorite warm-weather food: Gazpacho. There are a number of different ways to make it, and hundreds of recipes to choose from, but we kind of tend to do our own thing with this. For example, one recipe called for 4 cups of tomato juice. I had never, before yesterday, put more than a half cup of (spicy) tomato juice, aka Bloody Mary Mix, into my gazpacho. I like it to more chunky than soupy. Another recipe told me to put *everything* into the blender until it was all pulverized. I see this as a form of cheating: instead of forty-five minutes of peeling, seeding, chopping, dicing and mincing, you have five minutes of blender action! I did cheat this time and put about a fifth of the ingredients into the blender, but the result was...BROWN, and so I am glad I didn't do it with the whole thing!! Without further ado:

Slice two stalks of celery extra thin.
Seed and dice two yellow bell peppers (I used three mini ones that were on sale!)
Dice one purple onion
Dice one shallot
Quarter eight tomatoes. Remove the seed beds, and reserve for the blender action.
Peel, seed and dice one large cucumber.
Throw about a fifth of these ingredients into the blender with 1 cup spicy tomato juice.
Slice and dice the remaining tomato parts into 1/8 inch pieces. (See?! Time-consuming!)
Chop two green onions into 1/4 inch chunks.
Mince four cloves of garlic.
Take a handful of cilantro, wash thoroughly, pat dry and mince fine.
Add all ingredients to pulpy stuff in a non-metal bowl, stir VERY well.
Grind salt and pepper over top, squeeze the juice of one lime over it, and drizzle a bit of olive oil over all, and stir again.
Refrigerate overnight to let the flavors absorb.
Serve with slices of lemon as garnish, and make Tapatio available for the more adventurous!

The first time I made gazpacho, I was doing it mostly from memory, having had an excellent serving of it the night before at a now-closed restaurant downtown. (It's always the good ones...) I also did not know about the overnight-absorbing thing, so I kept tasting it and adding garlic! I could not figure out why it tasted so mild!!! When I took it out to serve the next night at dinner, though, boy howdy. I had quickly chopped up several more tomatoes and added regular tomato juice to try and cut the GARLIC MONSTER rearing out of the bowl!! Thankfully, all of our guests were garlic-fiends, so it wasn't so bad...