Gazpacho

Like many others, I found myself in a state of tomato overload this week, after my garden raiding adventures, gifts from my tomato overloaded neighbors plus a couple of trips to the farmer's market. I use them as much as I can, tomato sandwiches, garnishes on everything and salsa can only go so far, I am almost to the point where I need to start cooking and/or freezing but don't want to do that just yet. I decided to make a batch of Gazpacho!



Gazpacho is a lot of fun, but it does get you some odd looks, "Excuse me waiter... do you know this soup is ice cold?" Really it is quite good; this particular recipe is my favorite. To serve I scraped the inside out of a couple of large tomatoes and froze the empty shells (how cool is that!?) then filled them with the ice cold soup.

Ingredients
2 1/2 Cups of diced up tomatoes (I used several kinds)
1/2 cucumber peeled, seeded and diced
1 red bell pepper diced
2 cloves garlic minced
2 TBS sesame oil *
2 TBS parsley leaves
1 or 2 chili peppers**
1 cup of vegetable juice (you know... V-8)
Juice from one lime
salt and pepper to taste


* I love the flavor of sesame oil it adds a nice smoky depth, if you don’t like it use olive oil in instead


** These are the unnamed chili peppers from my garden, I have no idea what they are, they are smaller than the one jalapeño that I grew and have a pretty good kick to them. Here is what they look like if you know please tell me.

Put all of the ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth add the vegetable juice until you get the consistency that you want. Put it into a pitcher and chill until ice cold (3-4 hours). When it is time to serve pour into the frozen tomato cups and garnish.