I think I decided gazpacho is easy to make, but making good gazpacho is hard. Agree? Gazpacho can be a bit one-note, or a bit like eating salsa. It's harder to make something that you can serve as the main course of a meal.
The perk of this dish is that this time of year, most everyone has the ingredients for some kind of gazpacho. In Maine, and don't have an abundance of tomatoes yet? Just leave them out and add spinach, basil, and cilantro instead.
But when I whizzed up all the green vegetables I could find in my kitchen, added a liberal amount of salt and pepper, some cider vinegar, and olive oil, I still found myself bored half way through a bowl of it. [Adapted from Epicurious]
Side note: do not attempt to eat only gazpacho and cole slaw for lunch - vegetables alone will not get you through to your afternoon snack of bruschetta. You will then find yourself furiously chiffonading basil after work, and cut yourself on your not-so-recently-but-still-extremely-sharp professionally sharpened knife. So eat a substantial lunch, people.
Yes, I could have added Greek yogurt, cream, cheese, or some sort of meat to the gazpacho, but that seems to defeat the point, no?
Help a girl out.
But on a more successful note - I did have a break through in my bread storage techniques. I am pretty bad at keeping up with fresh bakery bread before it goes stale. Fresh bakery bread turns to stone in like .5 seconds, but can be softened in the oven or toaster - but have you ever tried to slice stone-like bread? Dangerous. And messy.
So with this Rosemont Bakery baguette, I ate my fill with afore mentioned bruschetta, and then sliced the rest into crostini sized pieces and 'on the side with dinner' pieces. I'm storing the bread at room temperature in a sealed, gallon-size zip top bag, but could also see keeping it in the fridge or the freezer.
I'm thinking now even if it gets stale, I can toast it without fighting the stale slicing game. Genius!
A small thing, but I was pretty proud.