Adventures in Cooking : Gazpacho

 

gazpacho

 

I know, I know, yesterday was the first day of October .

But it’s been a crazy warm here in Seattle this September and the farmers’ markets have been overflowing with delicious tomatoes.  I’ve been skinning and deseeding tons of tomatoes to make stacks of tomato sauce for the freezer and have discovered that if you rub the leftover skins and seed pulp through a sieve you get lots of the most delicious pulpy tomato juice.

Which is perfect for gazpacho.

The recipe below is one I cobbled up myself from various books and online sources. I’ve been fiddling with it for years now and can’t remember what my sources were, sorry. Spanish people have tried it though and it’s apparently pretty authentic.

 

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This chilled soup, which is nothing more than a whizzed up salad, is gorgeous when (if) the weather is warm and the tomatoes are juicy. I quite often make a big pot just for us to eat at home, but it also makes a great starter for a summer dinner party, in which case you may want to add the optional garnishes. Don’t bother making this if you can’t get hold of really delicious, juicy ripe tomatoes – in the US I use heirlooms and in the UK cherries.

You will need to whizz every thing together with a handheld blender. If you don’t have one you’re going to have to do messy things with a food processor or goblet blender. If you don’t have one of those, I really wouldn’t bother making this.

Ingredients

A big jugful of thick, pulpy tomato juice, or passata or a bunch of fresh, skinned and de-pipped tomatoes

½ large cucumber, peeled

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 small onion, red for preference

½ green pepper (optional, but Anaheims are nice)

2 slices white bread or 8 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar (or substitute red or white wine vinegar)

1 big handful parsley sprig

1 large sprig mint

few drops Tabasco (optional)

1 teaspoon tomato ketchup (optional, I prefer to use the Heinz stuff without HFCS, called ‘Simply Heinz in the US)

salt and pepper

FOR OPTIONAL GARNISH:

1 red pepper, chopped into tiny dice

1 green pepper, chopped into tiny dice

1 small red onion, chopped into tiny dice

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped into tiny dice

Tiny croutons

   

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Method

Place the tomato juice/tomatoes into a big jug. Roughly chop the cucumber, onion (and pepper if using) and add to the tomatoes together with the garlic, mint and parsley. Tear up the slices of bread or add the breadcrumbs. I always have a bag of fresh breadcrumbs in the freezer and add them frozen to the soup.

Whizz every thing together with your handheld blender. Add the oil, vinegar, Tabasco and salt and pepper to taste and a teaspoon of tomato ketchup if you think that your tomatoes need it (apparently they do this in Spain, so that’s OK). Stir together and chill in the fridge for at least an hour. Add a few ice cubes if you want to chill it faster.

   
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Art Yulia

 

Here’s a bit of lovely to start your week. Yulia Brodskaya is a Russian paper artist and graphic designer who now lives and works in London.

Her amazingly intricate and stunningly beautiful artwork made from coiled strips of coloured paper has been commissioned by a number of big brands.  I’m intrigued to see where it will end up next.

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Neiman_marcus_catalog_COVER BOstonglobeTNcover

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See Yulia’s entire portfolio here.  All images by Yulia Brodskaya.

   
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Saturday Link Love

 

piebox

 

At Piebox, they create raw pine boxes designed to transport a 9 inch pie safely and easily.  I may well be investing in one of these.

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Inaki Aliste Lizarralde draws incredibly detailed floorplans of the dwellings in famous TV shows. The post I wrote several years ago about Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment still gets hundreds of hits a week.

 

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In Fictitious Dishes, Dinah Fried recreates iconic food of literature in her food photography.  Here’s the grilled cheese from ‘Heidi’  that sounded so delicious when I was a child.

 

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Sheri Silver has been making fruit leather from all the excess fruit sitting in her fridge and I must do the same, since we’ve been going a little crazy picking wild blackberries recently.

 

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Lotta Jansdotter is launching a new line at Fishs Eddy.  The above invitation is from her Facebook page.

Have a great weekend!  I will be going to the North West Chocolate Fest tomorrow. Anyone else got some exciting plans?

   
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WTF Friday: Prada Spring 2013 Shoes

 

prada shoes spring 2013

 

Here are Miuccia Prada’s latest shoes.  Apparently the ‘socks’ are soft leather booties to which you can strap different shoe platforms. I’m not sure that makes them better or worse.

I have to admit that though my first reaction to these was ‘WTF?’ as I’ve been putting this post together I’ve come to appreciate them more as, I dunno, performance art or something.

And if I were very tall and very skinny and very rich, I might be tempted to wear the pink ones with skinny jeans and a simple cashmere sweater.

What do you chaps think?

   
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Father Rabbit

 

Why oh why oh WHY isn’t beautifully curated online shop Father Rabbit based in the US?

 

father-rabbit-onlineIt is incredibly unfair.  The good news though is that the New Zealand-based shop, run by husband and wife team Claudia Zinzan and Nick Hutchinson will shp worldwide at flat rates. 

Don’t tell the Husband, but I may have placed a teensy order today.

   
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Adventures in Cooking: Oven Dried Tomatoes in Oil

 

It’s been the most incredible warm, dry, sunny September here in Seattle and the whole place, even my little sidewalk veggie patch, is overflowing with ripe tomatoes. (If you’ve ever been to Seattle in September before you’ll know that it’s usually green tomato central round here).

 

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The farmers’ markets are teeming with fragrant ripe toms of every shape, size and hue and I’ve been desperately roasting them, drying them, making sauce and jugs of gazpacho (on the blog soon) until it comes out of our ears, in a frantic race against time to make the most of the bounty.

One quick and easy way to use up great tomatoes, particularly any pretty cherry or small tomatoes you can find, is to dry them in the oven.

Pick off the stalks and calyxes and wash the tomatoes.  Pat them dry with kitchen towel.  Put them in a bowl and add around a tablespoon of olive oil and a little pepper and good salt (I usually use Maldon Sea Salt). Swish everything around with your hands until each tomato is coated with oil and seasoning and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. You could add some chopped fresh herbs at this point.

 

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Heat the oven to its lowest possible temperature – my oven goes down to 180 degrees F (around 80 degrees C) – and then bake the tomatoes for a number of hours until they reach the level of dryness you want. 

These have been cooked down to a medium level of squishiness (mi cuit),

 

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Some of my mi cuit tomatoes have been stored in Ziploc bag in the freezer, ready to be slipped into sauces, casseroles, soups, stews in the winter months, but I also experimented in preserving some of them in oil.

Sterilise a pretty jar and pack with dried tomatoes.  I added my tomatoes hot from the oven so as to the flavour the oil as much as possible. Pour some good olive oil over the top leaving around an inch of headspace and tuck in garlic, herbs, spices or small chilis for flavour. I used branches of rosemary and slivers of garlic in this batch.

 

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I’m not sure how long these will last as they have not been properly canned.  I suggest you use yours up with two or three weeks (this will not be a problem as they so utterly delicious).  I’ve had mine for two weeks now and they are still perfect and taste mindblowingly good in salad or as an accompaniment to charcuterie. When you’ve used up all the tomatoes, the flavoured oil will be fabulous on salad or pasta.

Last night I chopped some of mine up fairly finely and added them to some melted butter and lemon juice as a topping for roasted halibut and they truly were exceptional.

   
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Go Fug Your Room: Nina Garcia’s New York Apartment

 

This month Architectural Digest is featuring the Upper East Side apartment of legendary fashion editor and US Project Runway judge Nina Garcia.

Which I was very much expecting to like as I enjoy her personal style very much (check out Sirs T and Lo’s ‘Judging the Judges’ columns for some examples). 

 

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And at first I thought I did. The light airiness of the apartment itself is lovely and the colour scheme seemed refreshing and unusual.

 

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But oh, Nina, Nina.  The more I looked at it I realised that I didn’t really like it at all. The colour story is only interesting because the stylist brought in some hot pink flowers and green leaves.  Look more closely and you’ll see that it’s a rather bland combination of white, grey, terracotta and camel, with some powder blue accents.

It also all seems rather uptight and uncomfortable – I think due to the lack of personal items beyond busts and artwork, and the spiky, brittle, skinny, fashion model legs on nearly every single piece of furniture. These are chairs and sofas made for perching, not for cosy snuggling.

The stone bust, vase and fireplace surround also seem rather hard and unfriendly, while the hideous carpet in the dining room, which admittedly is one of the few things with any personality in the entire apartment, looks like some fiendishly complicated children’s board game.

 

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This is apparently the apartment that Nina shares with her young family, and though I’m a great believer in keeping some spaces free of kid stuff, the fact that there is no trace of them in any of the rooms on show – no photos, kid art, toys, clothes or kid-friendly furniture -  seems a little sad. Or perhaps they’re occasionally permitted to play on the dining room carpet when their mother isn’t looking.

All in all the whole ambience just seems too controlled and impersonal, with any hint of quirkiness, personality, warmth, exuberance or life, expertly stifled by layer upon layer of expensive ‘good taste’.  But heck what do I know.

 

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The closet, on the other hand, is completely and utterly to die for.

 

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What do you chaps think?

 

   
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Emmys 2012: Canary Yellow Dresses

 

So you’re an uber stylish mega lady celebrity attending one of the big celebrity bashes of the year and you decide to wear a colour which is rarely seen on the red carpet but which will really make you stand out in the crowd.

Unfortunately for you, you have forgotten that mirrormirror is clearly the uber stylish mega lady celebrity’s fashion blog of choice (which is astonishing since we rarely discuss fashion) and that back in September 2011 we were discussing Caitlin Moran’s maxim that ‘yellow goes surprisingly well with everything’.

 

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So if you thought you were going to stand out in the crowd wearing your canary yellow dress, you clearly had another think coming.

Can you imagine how pissed off these women were yesterday evening?

UPDATE: Oops. Just found another one.

 

leslie-mann-emmys

   
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Saturday Link Love

 

I’m trying to be a bit more active on social media nowadays, posting up interesting things I see around and about to the mirrormirror Facebook page and to my Twitter stream.

I thought I’d also start doing a regular Saturday link round up for those of you who inexplicably don’t follow my aimless meanderings on social media, just in case you find yourselves with time on your hands at the weekend

 

Liberty Christmas Crackers

 

Apologies for talking about Christmas in September, but these Liberty print Christmas crackers are too beautiful not to share {via the beautiful new blog from erstwhile British rock chick and now designer Pearl Lowe}.

 

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I went to a class at the Pantry at Delancey a week or two back and was lucky enough to try their homemade roasted pepper hot sauce.  Which was amazing. You definitely need to make this.

 

Gold-Marmite

Marmite has brought out a limited edition gold version with edible golden flecks. I love it. (British in joke). Poor bereft overseas Marmite fans such as myself can order it from the official expat page on the Marmite website, which ships worldwide.

 

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Finally someone has worked out that it would make sense to have differently coloured dollar bills. And making them different lengths to ensure better money management is a fabulously ingenious idea.

I just wish these were real,  I get so confused. {From designboom via the lovely Tula}.

   
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