Gazpacho: Cold, tangy, perfect for summer

Chilled, chunky and chock full of healthy vegetables, this lively gazpacho makes a refreshing, simple first course all summer long.

Late last August, I was surprised to see that I hadn’t written about any of the cold soups we enjoy in the spring and summer, so I somewhat belatedly posted a recipe for Watercress Vichyssoise. In an effort to not make the same mistake twice [after all, there are so many exciting new mistakes to be made], I’m turning the kitchen over to Marion and her wonderful gazpacho this week.

I remember the first time I had pizza. I remember the first time I used chopsticks and the first time I made a pot roast and the first time I saw Terry and my first actual cocktail in an actual bar [it was a brandy Alexander—hey, I was an entry-level drinker—and it was Chumley’s].

I no longer remember the first time I had gazpacho. Although clearly there must have been a day when this Spanish soup came into our life, somehow I no longer remember it. Looking back it seems gazpacho has always been there for me, alongside Chinese food and raspberries and inhaling and exhaling.

Gazpacho is so much a part of our everyday life that it is a staple in our household every summer. Preparing it is so simple, almost as simple as eating it, and it is ever so useful. You can serve it to a vegan. You can make it when you don’t have electricity as long as you have a knife and a bowl and a willingness to chop. It is cooling and calming, it is reliable, it is esthetically pleasing, and it is full of healthy deliciousness.

Culinary histories trace gazpacho back to the Middle Ages in Andalusia. Originally, gazpacho was most likely pounded bread, garlic, oil, and water—the most basic sustenance, food for survival. Then came the Columbian era, and the arrival of the tomato from the New World. By 1600, tomatoes were being cultivated and devoured all over the Mediterranean. I sometimes wonder which tomato dish came first—the cooked or the raw. I can see some practical Spanish countrywoman, standing among her vines on a slow hot morning, holding the hot red fruit in her hand and thinking It seems a shame to fire up the stove.

Alice B. Toklas believed that gazpacho had inspired many cultures to create their own cold soups of chopped fresh vegetables. Actually, she regarded a host of cold vegetable-based soups—gazpacho, Polish chlodnik, Turkish cacik, and Greek tarata—as the same soup, which may be stretching things from the pragmatic side, but I get her taxonomic point.

There are many versions of gazpacho—probably more versions than there are cooks. Some call for hard-boiled, sieved eggs, some for ham, shrimp, peaches, veal broth, beef broth, red wine, aquavit, strawberries, yellow tomatoes, green tomatoes, roasted tomatoes. There are some recipes floating around online that are based on watermelon. The classic Andalusian form also calls for a paste of bread and olive oil, or a paste of pounded almonds. I want to try them all. Continue reading “Gazpacho: Cold, tangy, perfect for summer” →

Shrimp Scampi—easy on the butter, please

Shrimp, garlic, white wine and parsley get together with just enough butter for a rich, indulgent flavor in easy-to-make Shrimp Scampi with Fettuccine. Recipe below.

Coming from the ocean as they do, it’s fairly safe to assume that shrimp can swim. And if you look at most recipes for shrimp scampi, they apparently love to swim in butter. I make this classic dish so infrequently that I always forget this about it. Guess I’m so focused on the shrimp, garlic and parsley—for me, these are the ingredients that define the dish.

But when the hankering for shrimp scampi hit last weekend and I started looking at recipes, there it was. One recipe called for five tablespoons of butter, along with 1/4 cup of olive oil—more than half a cup of fat for a pound of shrimp. This was typical. And another recipe called for 3/4 cup of butter [12 tablespoons! 1-1/2 sticks!] for a pound and a half of shrimp.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cooking with butter. It imparts a rich flavor to foods and a luxurious, silky texture to sauces that only it can deliver. But while I usually agree with Mae West that “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” sometimes it’s just, well, too much.

So I decided to see how much I could ease up on the butter [and fat in general] and still have have my shrimp scampi taste satisfyingly rich. I ended up with a mix of two tablespoons each of butter and olive oil. Still not a skinny minnie recipe, but since it makes four servings, that’s a tablespoon of fat per serving, minus whatever stays in the pan and serving bowl. Not bad. And please don’t try to convince me or yourself that you can achieve the same taste with butter-flavored Pam cooking spray. You’ll just make me sad. Continue reading “Shrimp Scampi—easy on the butter, please” →

Spring, schming—It might as well be chili dogs

The lack of reliably warm weather this spring calls for comfort food, and Turkey Chili Dogs don’t just hit the spot—they obliterate it. Recipe below.

This week’s post was supposed to be a light chicken sandwich celebrating the flavors of spring. I’d already created it in my head, and just thinking of it now, I can actually taste it.

But spring is being especially coy this year. We should be flinging windows open, airing out the apartment and waking to birds singing. Instead, we awoke this weekend to a cold rain being blown hard against the windows. The temperature was in the 40s and not predicted to do a lot better than the low 50s, and besides the rain, there was a wind advisory.

I had to absolutely will myself out of the warm bed to get my day started. Clearly, some light sandwich celebrating spring was not going to happen. Comfort food was called for. And to my way of thinking, there are few foods more comforting than a chili dog on a raw day.

We’ve sung the praises of chili here before. And we’ve presented various takes on it—my three-bean chili, Marion’s amazing chili and even a white chili. Whatever your regional preferences—beans, no beans, meat, no meat—chili is just plain good.

Hot dogs are less universally understood. Growing up in St. Louis, hot dogs were what you got at the ball game or something you threw on the barbecue grill for the kids when the grown-ups were having burgers. So I was somewhat mystified when I moved to Chicago the first time [this is our second tour of duty here, as I like to put it] and there seemed to be a hot dog stand every other block or so [outrageous real estate prices have diminished the number of hot dog places severely, but Chicagoans can still find plenty of places to get a great dog].

Then I had one. The word revelation springs to mind. As Doug of Hot Doug’s says, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘encased meats,’ my friend.” Unless you live in Chicago or New York, you may not get this level of fervor for the seemingly lowly hot dog. And even if you do get them, you’ll get all kinds of takes on what makes the perfect dog, some of them regional. Here is how NPR’s Daniel Pinkwater, born in Chicago but now living in exile in upstate New York, describes a Chicago dog:

“First, it’s on a poppy-seed bun which is doughy and substantial, but not heavy. The bun is lightly steamed at the point of serving.

“The hot dog is all beef, spicier than the New York variety. It is steamed and has a natural casing. It snaps when you bite into it, and squirts hot deliciousness. A variant is the Polish sausage which the gods ate on Olympus.
This is what goes on it:
• Yellow mustard
• Bright green pickle relish
• Chopped onion
• A kosher pickle spear
• Two slices of tomato
• Two tiny but devastating peppers
• And all-important, celery salt

“All of this is fitted together with fiendish cleverness enabling the eater to get most of it in his mouth, and only a little on his shirt. If there are fries, they are hand cut, skinny and glorious.”

Chili + Dog: The whole equals waaaay more than the sum of its parts. Okay, we’ve established that these foods are wonderful in their own right. I’d heard that chili dogs were even better, but it took Marion to introduce me to their delights. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, as I recall, and we suddenly found ourselves in the lovely semi-deserted darkness of the original John Barleycorn, a long, rambling bar and restaurant on Lincoln Avenue. I had a burger in mind, but Marion started exclaiming when she found chili dogs on the menu. I was skeptical, but even back then, I’d learned to trust her taste buds.

So we each ordered one. Honestly, it fell a little bit short of amazing. But it showed me amazing could be had. As with almost every chili dog you’ll find in a bar, restaurant or hot dog stand, there wasn’t enough chili. Here’s how you can tell: If you can pick up the chili dog and eat it without utensils, there’s not enough chili. Hell, if you can see the hot dog or much of the bun, there’s not enough chili. We bury them. In fact, for the photo above, I kind of skimped on the chili just so you could see the dog and bun.

But the wonder of the combined flavors was undeniable. Our first impulse was to order more there and tell them not to be so shy with the chili. But then we had a better idea. We hightailed it out of the bar, headed for the grocery store and then went home and cooked up the first of many chili dog orgies. Continue reading “Spring, schming—It might as well be chili dogs” →

This is some serious gingerbread

Dark molasses, black pepper and Chinese five-spice powder make for big-flavored gingerbread with plenty of spicy bite. Recipe below.

I KNOW IT’S MAY, BUT IT’S BECOME COLD HERE AGAIN. Spring had a few tentative successes—the young leaves started emerging, all soft and green, the small brown birds came back and began claiming real estate and singing to each other, pollen floated from the trees and we put away our duvets and down coats and brought out the light blankets and the little thin jackets. Then on Friday, it rained—where we were, it rained a lot and the atmosphere was quite unsettled—and then the temperature dropped very aggressively. Last night, shivering and muttering, I gave up and dragged the duvet out for what I hope will be its last hurrah. On the other hand, I also resumed baking gingerbread. Continue reading “This is some serious gingerbread” →