Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

With tomato season in full effect — well, except for DAD GANSIE’s garden because he doesn’t start his planting until very late witch means his yard yields vegetables until November — it means gazpacho time. And that run-on sentence was dedicated to DAD GANSIE.

Embarrassingly, I’ve never thrown together this classic summertime soup. I grew to love it during my summer in Barcelona where the women in my dorm would throw together this cooling, super fresh dish every day. It was really the only thing that would make me leave the beach and head to afternoon class.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what makes something a gazpacho, but I can tell you, these bloggers are not following any rules I’ve ever seen on the subject.

Top Left: Golden Gazpacho [Vegan for the People]
We love our vegan friends, even though BS can never shut the fuck up about bacon. This recipe is actually not as revolutionary as some other vegan dishes that have been featured on ES (I’m looking at you Hezbollah Tofu) and I say that as a compliment. Everyone always thinks that when something is vegetarian or vegan, it’s going to be some bastard child of what it should be. Vegan for the People chooses a beautiful yellow tomato, topped with a cilantro garnish to create his spin on this light meal.

Top Right: Greek Gazpacho [Kalofagas]
This Greek version starts off normal: red tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, vegetable cocktail (cheating?) and then goes freaking berserk when it calls for the use of a shot glass. Now I was excited when I saw those iceberg size cubes of feta, but just try to guess what that greenish globe in the middle is. It’s frozen olive oil! An olive oil ice cube! OMG! Kalofagas suggests either using a shot glass (filled halfway) or an ice cube tray to create these solid masses of oil, which will keep your soup flavorful and cold.

Bottom Left: Gazpacho Salad [Smitten Kitchen]
Okay, I can’t even pretend that I’m sure this belongs in today’s edition of WCiB. But, hey, if Smitten is going to put “gazpacho” in the recipe name, then I think it’s fair game. The gazpacho salad is more or less made up of the same ingredients as regular gazpacho, but not blended. The addition of homemade croutons makes this akin to panzanella, but not quite drinkable.

Bottom Right: Avocado-Sesame Gazpacho with Cilantro and Sauteed Shrimp [Croque-Camille]
Avocado! Now, there are no tomatoes in this recipe whatsoever, so I’m uncertain how this Camille girl can get away with calling it a gazpacho. However, she seduced me with her use of avocado. With an immersion blender, Camille combines avocado, tahini and fish stock among other ingredients to lay a base for her sauteed shrimp. Sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds, this is surely a slap in the face to the flourishing tomato crop.

Who Cooked [Gazpacho] Better?

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I actually made this soup in tandem with Padma Lakshmi’s first course: the mushroom and goat cheese flautas. But, as you’ll soon understand, this one took a lot more inventiveness. (Editor’s Note: This was all before we heard about Vi’s potato-and-cream fueled cucumber soup, which, for the record, makes Ms. Lakshmi’s recipe look like a little girl’s soup). So Padma’s soup is pretty simple: English cucumber, yogurt, mint and sea salt, all blended together and chilled. I’m not sure why I was so taken with it. I guess she just drew me in with lines like “It tastes of the cool, grassy notes of summer.” Who knew she was a poet too?

So I whipped this all up, chilled it a little bit, and…I mean, it was fine. It did kind of taste like the cool, grassy notes of summer, but it was also kind of bland and unexciting, like the second week of June, and you’re still in school. But of course I took some liberties and managed to spice it up a bit….

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My SNDC (Sunday Night Dinner Club) convened this past weekend at the home of our only member who owns a tool-kit, we’ve not been getting together as often as we usually do due to summer travels but this weekend was a must, our good friend T2 turned twenty-errr, anyway. T2 is one of those veggie types, and when we cook SNDC the veggie dishes are usually cooked by the birthday boy but as it was his birthday we couldn’t really ask him to cook, could we? I decided to theme the dinner on tomatoes, I wrote a few weeks back about the tomato scare that the country has been under so I thought I would laugh in the face of danger and host a tomato themed dinner, I had it planned for over a week and then on Friday the FDA cleared tomatoes of salmonella, damn you government types for thwarting my danger plan.

I have to admit something to you all, up until this past weekend I was a virgin… a Dupont Farmers Market virgin that is! I had never been before and wow, very impressed. So on Sunday morning with coffee in hand, I was your picture perfect foodie, buying organic carbon-footprint free produce and cheeses for my dinner.

After the jump, recipes and pictures of the four tomato base dishes (keep in mind these recipes are for 12 people).

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Editors Note: We broke her! Vi has finally come around to blogging! I first showcased Vi’s cooking prowess on her swordfish dish. But I was the one that had to take the picture and transcribe her recipe. This time around—and out of the fucking blue—she sent me pictures and a full blown blog entry. We’re very excited to finally show off Vi’s creations.

Oh, and the soup she’s referring to—yes, I’ve had it. It’s awesome. She made this with some crazy um, Moroccan/North African/Indian (clearly I forget) meal that was quite spicy. She also pan-fried flat bread - from scratch. I know. She should totally have her own blog. Welcome, Vi.

byline: Vi

I love to cook. It is my creative output when I get home from sitting in front of computers all day. Most of my cravings come from home cooked meals that my mom has made me and still will make me when I go home to visit. Reinventing these meals, even when I have her recipe in front of me or her on the phone, always falls short of my memory of the dish. This is one of the recipes that took me forever to attempt, knowing that it would not meet my memory of the crisp and refreshing soup that I would drink during my summers in Vermont. I mean, how could it be? It calls for cooked lettuce?

Written on scrap paper, this recipe—for all I know—could be from the Joy of Cooking. Anyway,the second time I made it I more or less just threw the ingredients in without measuring. I also used veggie broth instead of chicken broth to make this soup all vegetarian. I also added dill. Lots of dill. Feel free to make this soup your own.

Recipe post jump

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So, my hubbie brought home a recipe from a coworker one day that was a take off on the Olive Garden’s “Tuscan Soup”. I am not a frequenter of the Olive Garden, but had already had a recreation of this soup at a friend’s house and enjoyed it thoroughly. We started making it more or less from the recipe and have loved it for over a year now. Sometime in the last couple of months we lost the recipe. So now that I am making it from out of my head, and have tweaked a little here and there, and this last time we made it, the soup came out the best ever, I’m pretending it’s my recipe version.

I will share the deliciousness with you post jump, and you can help me come up with my own name for it and answer the question, “Is it a chowder?”

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Check out my article over at Wired about the pure craziness surrounding getting one of the 12 seats at Momofuku Ko.

So much has already been written about the food at Momofuku Ko, so I won’t bore you with yet another full rundown of the 10-course tasting menu. But I did manage to snag a reservation (don’t ask how!) so I do of course have a few points I just have to share.

- The first thing they serve you is an English muffin. I shit you not. They even call it that. Of course it has pork fat slathered on top. Naturally.

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In last week’s Who Cooked It Better?, Giada De Laurentiis put some serious smackdown on Rachael Ray. With more than 340 of you weighing in, Giada’s prosciutto-wrapped scallops are preferred to Rachael Ray’s by a whopping 86% to 14% margin.

Speaking of RayRay, she may be on the market for a new nemesis, because her frequent sparing partner, Mr. Anthony Bourdain, has a powerful new enemy.

You may remember that Bourdain earned the ire of the vegetarian/vegan community with this quote:

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

Well the folks over at the new Hezbollah Tofu blog are putting their money where their morals are. They’re cooking their way through Bourdain’s classic Les Halles Cookbook, in an attempt to prove that his fatty, meat-y, extra cheesy recipes can be just as tasty sans the animal products. Hezbollah Tofu’s first challenge is one of the Les Halles mainstays: French onion soup.

Bourdain’s version, on the left, starts with a meat-heavy broth that calls for both chicken stock and bacon. Complicating life for the vegans is a whopping six ounces of butter. This delectable mess is topped with crispy baguette croutons and grated Gruyere cheese. (Real, imported, Gruyere, obv.) If that’s not enough food snobbery for you, the recipe calls for a Bouquet Garni (that’s chef-speak for parsley, thyme and bay leaf). Complete recipe here.

It obviously won’t be easy for Hezbollah Tofu to top Tony B’s gooey bowl of goodness, but she gets downright creative on Bourdain’s ass, losing the bacon and subbing in black trumpet mushrooms blanched in a sherry/vegetable stock mixture. And this is no bland, tofu-based fake cheese - tahini, nutritional yeast, lemon juice and more go into this delicate un-cheese. In a final attempt to out-fancy Bourdian, the vegan FOS is topped with toasted almonds. Complete recipe here.

So, dear readers…

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Photos: Chowhound, Hezbollah Tofu.

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I’m proud to report that I made some progress in “not cheating” for Sunday night dinner. Although I didn’t whip up something intense, I actually did so some prep work, as opposed to the shame that was last week.

I obviously spent the day sleeping in, watching football (Eli continues on?!?!) and this terrible commercial 700 times (although for some reason, 80 loves it,) reading a good amount of the Wash Post* (that’s me to the right) and, of course, eating.

*Okay, let me rant for a second. I hate/do not believe when people say they read the whole paper every morning. That’s a lie. The paper is HUGE. It’s absolutely impossible to read the entire paper every morning. You’d have to start reading the second it was delivered (4-5 am? and shoot-off rant, you know you’re in trouble when you get home from a night partying and the paper is already delivered, but that can be a rant for another day) to be done reading it by the time you had to go to work. Sure, some people are animals and get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and drink coffee and read the paper and save the world, but I’m sooo not one of them. And anyway, they’re lying. 80 and I spent three hours tag-teaming the paper and we still couldn’t get through the whole thing. Regardless.

So for dinner, 80 and I flirted with the idea of ordering from Goodys, one of those all encompassing delivery places. They serve everything from fried rice to buffalo wings to burritos to chicken parm subs. And, during the end/beginning of the year, they also give a complimentary calendar/menu (see left) along with the food. The calendar kicks ass, it features the Chinese Zodiac (or peacocks or pandas) as well as their extensive menu, ensuring easy ordering all year long. But, we decided instead to find something in the kitchen because god-forbid one of us has to actually leave the apartment and go downstairs to get the food. Leaving the couch was hard enough.

Continue reading for the startling conclusion to Sunday night eating.

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BS’s famous presidential unendorsements inspired 80 and I to make some down-home chili and watch the caucus last Tuesday. Chili’s great for a TV night. Prep work is minimal and once all the ingredients are simmering away in the pot, there’s barely any work to be done, except for the occasional stir. So while it’s ridiculously warm out in the Nation’s capital, think about all those poor New Hamshireites (sp) that are braving the cold to pledge their allegiance to the candidate of choice - and eat some chili for them. (And, if we have any NH-ers in the building - click here for the latest ES undersorsements.)

And yes, pictured above are actual caucus go-ers. 80 is so obsessed with his new camera that he’s started taking photos of the television. Swear!

Also, and this may be controversial, but I tagged chili as “soup.” Now, I know you’re probably thinking: “You ES-ers have sooo many categories already that no one will even notice if you if you add in ‘chili.’ ” But I do try to fit things in to our pre-existing tags if possible. So I think I’m going to stick with chili as a soup on this one. Leave it in the comments if you think it’s an absolute atrocity that must be stopped immediately.

Recipes (for chili and accompanying corn bread products) and many pics, post-jump.

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