Gazpacho and a tiny beach

A productive day so far: another small picture finished and dispatched to my brother along with the four other ones from my last post, dinner sorted out, a repaired PA system delivered back to school after an unknown person fiddled with the back of it and broke an aerial and a socket (allegedly during the PTA summer fair), four loads of washing put away and a coffee in the sun with friends (although one has just alerted me to the fact that we walked out of the pub garden and completely forgot to pay for the coffee; I do hope the wanted posters aren't up around the village yet. Must remember to put it right on the way back to school).

First the picture: the last of my little tiny ones. This time I have done some high-density beading in just one small area; it must be relief at reverting to my usual beading on the left-hand side:-

 



I am really looking forward to dinner; it is the best ever meal for really hot days - cooling and refreshing, yet gutsy and satisfying. I mentioned before that I have been doing the 5:2 diet (5 days of eating what I like and 2 of fasting with just 500 calories a day, every week) quite successfully for a while and although I normally hate calorie-counting, today is a fast day and you might be pleased to hear that this only has 164 calories in a serving:-

 

Gazpacho (wish I could pronounce it properly; it grieves me that my children come home from school uttering strange Hispanic words when it is practically the only western European language I haven't learned. Mental note to self: Must Find Someone to Help Me Learn Spanish)

Serves 2

 

6 medium tomatoes (or 270g), peeled and de-seeded

1/3 cucumber, roughly chopped

1/3 pepper, roughly chopped - it should be a green one but I only had red today

1/4 red onion, roughly chopped

A very small clove of garlic, roughly chopped

1 1/2 slices stale bread, broken up

2 1/2 tablespoons vinegar - it should be sherry vinegar but I only had white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

Salt & pepper

1/2 teaspoon sugar

250mls water

 

Not much to the method: put it all in a pot and blend until it's soup. Check for seasoning: it might need more salt. If it tastes a bit boring, you might need a tad more vinegar, red onion and/or garlic. Chill it thoroughly for a couple of hours as there's nothing worse than one that's room temperature. But make sure you cover it with several layers of cling film so your fridge doesn't end up stinking of raw garlic and onion (as indeed your breath might after you've eaten it). I really despise recipes that suggest country-hopping for ingredients as it offends the purist in me, but here goes: on non-fast days I love this with either some cool mozzarella gently broken on top, or grilled halloumi on the side, and a drizzle more of olive oil on top, and some rosemary focaccia to go with it. It's also probably worth mentioning that once I had an enterprising salad in a French restaurant, comprising lettuce and the usual salad ingredients, succulent big prawns and a scoop of gazpacho sorbet in the middle, so I suppose you could freeze it in an ice-cream maker. Yum.