Breakfast in Spain is unsubstantial, to my taste: a toasted and buttered bolillo (a large roll) and café con leche, Spain’s rich and tasty version of the latte. (I don’t like coffee or even lattes particularly, but I’ll take a café con leche any day.) Supper, as well, is fairly insubstantial: fried finger foods or a light platter of leftovers, served at 11 p.m., midnight, or even later, depending on the night-owlishness of your household.

Those are the foods my host mom, when I spent 6 months studying in Seville in college, served for breakfast and supper. She was garrulous and quick with a smile, matronly and recently-grandmotherly as well. Also in the household was my roommate and confidante, Laura; and host mom’s two daughters, one also with a husband and 3-year old daughter of her own. However, due to the 8 a.m. light breakfast and midnight greasy/not-filling supper, I was hungry quite often!

Lunch helped alleviate that. The biggest meal of the day in Mediterranean countries, usually eaten just before taking a siesta. My day went like so: get up and get breakfast around 8 a.m. Walk 45 minutes to classes, attend classes. Walk 45 minutes home around 2 p.m., famished, and have it alleviated by a home-cooked meal often followed by the biggest, juiciest, navel oranges you have ever eaten.

And after siesta, often it was another 45-minute walk back to the city center to hang out until the wee hours of the morning. Oh. That’s me in my feria dress. For Seville’s yearly post-Lent carnival and fair. Yeah. Dancing flamenco in that til 5 a.m. was kinda fun, actually.

Often host mom served fatty pork-based dishes that Laura and I picked at desultorially but tried to eat for sustenance. Occasionally she’d surprise us and make a Spanish or Andalusian classic, stunningly: a transcendent tortilla de patatas — transcendent precisely because the dish is basically eggs and potatoes — or gazpacho. Rich, smooth gazpacho as I like to imagine only the brash, proud Sevillanos would dare make it — with lots of fruity olive oil and soaked bread.

it’s tomato soup, served ice cold!

On the Simpsons, Lisa got laughed out of a party when she proudly presented her contribution, gazpacho. “It’s tomato soup, served ice-cold!”

Gazpacho is tomato soup, true, but in the sense that a Chevette is a car. It sounds really similar to a Corvette, yet they are very different machines.

People, well-intentioned people, absolutely mangle gazpacho. They make it without bread. They make it without olive oil. They put in a bunch of herbs and spices. They make it chunky. And when they serve a bowl filled with watery chunks of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, and ice cubes, people understandably balk.

They make it wrong. Wrong, I say!

gazpacho: the corvette of tomato soups

I’m biased due to my original gazpacho experiences. Inflexible, I am certain that gazpacho must contain, besides tomatoes, bread; it must contain olive oil, and a bit of garlic, cucumber, bell pepper, and onion; and it must be velvety smooth and thick.

I prepared this gazpacho for many reasons. One is to celebrate summer’s end. Though nearly October, the tomatoes still cling to the vines; they are the last ones. The green tomatoes will not ripen before a frost comes. Same goes for peppers; the onions are already pulled a month ago and cured; and cucumbers are long gone. Another reason to make gazpacho was to make use of the Nature’s Pride bread that I got from a coupon they sent me via Foodbuzz. This gazpacho recipe will be entered in a competition to be featured at the Foodbuzz blogging festival in November.

If it’s still warm where you are, or if there are still homegrown tomatoes available, try to make some gazpacho before the cold sets in for good. Having gazpacho today was a warm splash of summer.

gazpacho sevillano

This recipe was inspired by a Spanish-language post deep in some forums on Microsoft’s Spanish version of Bing. It looked close to what I remembered. I accidentally doubled the bread, but found it perfectly matched the gazpacho I knew and loved. For a less thick soup, use only 2 slices of stale bread. I also use less bell pepper and cucumber than most gazpacho recipes call for. Use your own taste buds and add ingredients to suit yourself. It’s easy to toss in a few more pieces of cucumber or green pepper to the food processor if the mixture seems to need them. Be careful with the garlic — a little raw garlic goes a looooong way. Also, I took the advice from Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table and used a food processor first to mix, then transferred it to a blender to make the gazpacho silky smooth.

time: 60 minutes, if you are slow like me
yield: 5 cups, or 1¼ liters
special equipment: food processor and/or blender

4 slices (7 ounces or 200 grams) of stale Nature’s Pride Country White or any other white bread, crusts removed
2–3 pounds tomatoes — I used bumpy, blemishy heirloom tomatoes that I have to cut away lots of, so I used 3 pounds
2 small cloves garlic or 1 large clove, peeled
½ small red or yellow onion
½ of a medium cucumber, peeled
1 small green bell pepper
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons champagne vinegar — sherry vinegar is often the type called for, but this works fine
salt to taste

Note: You’ll be making half of the recipe at a time. The food processor won’t hold everything at once, if yours is a normal-sized food processor.

First, put on a pot of water to boil. You’ll be slipping the tomatoes in there to loosen their skins.

While waiting for the water to boil, tear the stale bread into small pieces and put them into a bowl. Fill with water and let soak.

Prepare the vegetables. Peel the garlic. Peel the onion and cut it into quarters. Peel the cucumber half and cut into chunks. Core and peel — yep, peel — the green pepper. It’s pretty easy to just hold it in your hand and peel; seems easier than an apple. If you’re sure your food processor and blender can pulverize the skin, skip peeling. Toss 1 clove of garlic, half the cucumber, and half the green pepper into the food processor’s bowl.

Once the water is boiling, drop the tomatoes in for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Remove the tomatoes and plunge into cold water. The peels will slip right off. Remove tomato peels, then core and seed the tomatoes. Add half the tomatoes to the food processor. Add half of the soaked bread, squeezing lightly before putting it in.

Whirl it all together until it appears smooth. Add ¼ cup of the olive oil and 1 tablespoon of the vinegar. Process until all mixed. Transfer to a blender. Make the second half of the gazpacho by putting the rest of the seeded tomatoes, cucumber, onion, garlic (if using), green pepper and bread into the food processor. Mix, then add the remaining ¼ cup olive oil and 1 tablespoon vinegar. Taste and adjust vegetables/seasoning if desired.

Transfer the second half of the gazpacho to the blender. Whirl together until velvety smooth. Add salt to taste. Serve chilled. Garnish with finely diced cucumber; green, red, and yellow bell pepper; and quartered or halved cherry or grape tomatoes. Serve with crusty bread and a quality olive oil.

This is the time of year when we write posts about how tired we are of winter. But I’m not. I’m totally over being tired of winter. I already gave in a few weeks ago to the allure of fresh produce, abandoning the frozen corn, green beans, and zucchini in favor of bean sprouts, cucumbers, and oh my lord grape tomatoes as big as your thumb.

There’s still part of a cabbage in the fridge — my cabbages grow to gigantic proportions, I don’t know why — but the last of fall’s carrots was gone over a month ago and yes, I tired of the old. I wanted the crunch of nutrients I hadn’t had fresh in months.

I abandoned locavore eating. Just until spring, and just once in a while. There’s something about fresh sprouts. They’re a promise. They’re potentiality. They could have become beans, but instead they’re going into my tummy. They’re earthy and new and taste of beginnings.

And this salad. Oh, this salad is all about the decadence, the utter wrongness, so wrong it’s right, of eating things that have been trucked two thousand miles. This is what perked me up, got me looking forward to the herb seeds I planted today, made me impervious to the clutch of the muddy clay that is my yard as I glop through it in winter boots, leaving wet dinosaur footprints that would fossilize when the ground dries, if I weren’t going to seed it with grass this spring.

We’ll be eating local again soon, very soon. And even now, I still take down a jar of pasta sauce made from my tomatoes and onions for supper, and pull 2008 applesauce from the freezer, still tree-fresh. But along with preserved homegrown every few days or so something like this salad pops into my mind, and demands attention.

I think it’s the cucumber seeds up on the shelf, whispering to me that they’re ready, almost ready. Ready to grow.

yes, peanut dressing is the bomb

Indonesian tofu, bean sprout, and cucumber salad with spicy peanut dressing, from Jeanne Lemlin’s Vegetarian Classics, takes simple ingredients and elevates them with this peanut dressing.

It’s to die for. Take tofu roasted in sesame oil and soy sauce, bean sprouts, cucumber, and green onion. Nice ingredients, but who cares?

Peanut dressing cares, that’s who. It’s just got all good stuff in it: peanut butter, soy sauce, brown sugar, lime juice, you know the drill. I’m sure you could find other uses for it beyond just this salad. A regular green salad, for example, or in a quinoa salad. Some kind of cold fried rice?

In any case, if you still suffer the winter blahs, consider breaking the locavore commitment for just a few meals, gather up some sprouts and cucumber, and try this salad.

indonesian tofu, bean sprout, and cucumber salad with spicy peanut dressing

Adapted from Vegetarian Classics by Jeanne Lemlin

servings: 4 as a side salad or very light meal; 2 as a meal

peanut dressing:

¼ cup natural-style peanut butter

2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce
 (choose a brand without wheat for going gluten-free)
1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice

2 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar
1 garlic clove, minced
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3 tablespoons water

salad:

1 recipe roasted tofu (recipe here)
2 cups mung bean sprouts

1 small English cucumber, sliced 1/4 inch thick

1 green onion, very thinly sliced, tops only

To make the spicy peanut dressing, combine all the dressing ingredients in a small bowl and beat vigorously with a fork or small whisk until very smooth.

To assemble the salad, spread 1/4 of the bean sprouts on each of 4 salald plates. Layer on 1/4 of the cucumber, followed by 1/4 of the tofu. Drizzle the dressing over each portion and garnish with sliced green onion.

We love seaweed, how about you?

People were confused when I told them my aunt Linda and I would be making sushi for January’s 24, 24, 24 event. “Isn’t that raw fish?” they asked, knowing I’m not a huge fan of animal foods. Technically, sushi is rice that’s been specially prepared with vinegar and a little sugar, and topped with or rolled with…something.

It could be a shaped piece of rice with a slice of lightly steamed bias-cut carrot on top, tied with a scallion. This is nigiri sushi.

It could be a fat roll of rice bound in nori (seaweed) and filled with imitation crab strips, tamago (japanese omelet), scallion, and cucumber. This is futo maki.

It could be an inside out roll, with the rice outside the seaweed, all enveloping imitation crab, avocado, and pickled beets. This is uramaki. But everyone calls it inside out roll.

It could even be dessert.

Other forms of sushi include battleship roll (gunkan), which we didn’t make, temaki, which we didn’t make, and hosomaki, or thin rolls, which we did make, but I didn’t get any closeups of. Thin rolls use half a sheet of nori and are filled with only one or two ingredients besides the sushi rice.

what’s in this post, and what isn’t

This post isn’t going to include detailed instructions for making sushi. One, I’m no expert. I just made it for the first time. Two, if I started giving instructions, I’d never stop, and this would run 2,000 words or more. What I will tell you is what’s involved, the accompaniments, how our experience went, and a few links where you can get more information if you’d like to give it a try yourself.

And a recipe for rice for dessert sushi at the end!

accompaniments and fillings we used

One thing that’s absolutely necessary is a bamboo rolling mat. We got ours for $1.99 at a Chinese grocery. Well, we also got two more in a sushi kit Linda found at Barnes and Noble. The kit contained the book Sushi with Style, which turned out to be a clearly-written, informative resource. There’s a bamboo sushi rolling mat at Amazon for $6 that includes a paddle if you have any trouble finding one.

Pickled ginger.

Pink slivers of tangy ginger, these are meant to cleans the palate between bites of sushi. Right. Philistine that I am, I slap a piece of pickled ginger right on top of every piece of sushi I eat. It’s that good.

For this experiment, I made some pickled ginger of my own. Let’s just say that the inner, woody parts of ginger are not something you want to chew on, unless you really enjoy chewing.

Wasabi.

Green, insanely hot horseradish. Sold as a paste or powder. The lady at the Chinese supermarket and the sushi book both recommend using the powder as it’s better tasting. I wouldn’t know. I won’t touch the stuff. We did make some and use it, though. It makes a good glue for pasting toppings to the rice in nigiri.

Toasted sesame seeds.

Nice for decorating the outsides of inside-out rolls. Like a dumbass, I bought the unroasted kind a while back so now I have to toast them myself. Hey, look at my shiny new pan.

Tamago.

A Japanese omelet made with, among other things, mirin, a sweet rice wine usually found near the vinegars in the store. Or the Asian section. I made one of these, too.

Vegetables.

We used cucumber, carrot, scallions, pickled beets, and avocado.

Fish, raw and cooked.

We used imitation crab and raw tuna steak. I got to keep the leftover tuna to cook up later, slapped it in a lime-ginger marinade, pan-seared it, and it was good.

Rice!

You need sushi rice, a medium-grain rice. We used brown rice because of the whole whole-grain dealy. After cooking the rice, you mix in a vinegar-sugar sauce that lightly flavors the rice and helps it stick together. I’m not going to get into all the detail, because there was all this anal-retentive dribbling of the sauce into the rice down the back of the rice paddle (yes, the paddle actually has a groove for this, it’s nuts), fanning of the rice to cool its delicate little toes, and speaking to the rice in hushed tones so as not to break its pretty little grains. However, the people at The Global Gourmet have a good how-to guide on preparing your sushi rice, and the technique for cooking brown sushi rice that I used — in a pressure cooker!

so, how did it go?

Linda arrived around noon bearing ingredients and her pressure cooker. I earned a well-deserved glower when I showed her the brand spanking new pressure cooker I had already borrowed from my friend Lori.

However, Linda’s old-school stovetop pressure cooker came in handy when the power went out just as I was about to get the rice going (it had been soaking, as instructed in the anal-retentive sushi rice instructions, for over an hour already). Twice. She took a batch of the rice to her house to cook on the gas stovetop.

Chubby gods smiled upon us and the power didn’t go out again, and we commenced work making the kitchen into a disaster zone.

As usual when we’re making something brand new to us, things were so hectic I didn’t get any nice step-by-step shots. However, I was able to sneak in a five-second breather to snap a pic of how rice looks spread on nori, ready for fillings. You’d just lay three or four ingredients lengthwise in the middle of the rice, next to one another, not on top, and use the mat to roll it all up.

Some fillings: steamed bias-cut carrot coins for nigiri, scallions, tamago.

dessert sushi?

The book offered a sushi rice recipe made with cream of coconut and rum instead of vinegar and sugar, and suggested trying dessert sushi. We didn’t have cream of coconut so I cracked open (get it? cracked? coconut?) a can of coconut milk and got some of the coconut cream that had solidified from that. We seasoned a batch of rice with it and shaped it into nigiri.

Instead of wasabi, which would be pretty damn gross with fruit, the “glue” we used was strawberry jam, boiled cider that I had in the fridge (don’t ask), or apple butter.

The fruit toppers were slices of kiwi and mango, and we topped those with flaked coconut, a slice of candied ginger, and/or coarse sparkling sugar.

sisterhood of the traveling sushi

Linda posited that we made a good $60 of sushi. This was kind of a lot for two people, so we took the show on the road, first to my sister’s.

After some trepidation, not only Jennifer, but her husband Dale, who isn’t the sushi type, tried several varieties. I was pretty shocked. The dessert sushi was a hit, as was the inside-out roll with crab, avocado, and pickled beet.

Maggie snubbed the sushi, instead making up a bowl of some soggy cereal and pretending to be shy for the camera.

Afterwards, we took some over to Mom and Dad’s, and Mom gamely tried a bit as well.

is this really something you want to do at home?

Absolutely! Don’t be frightened by our scary messy kitchen pic. That was from making like, a dozen? kinds of sushi, including both a sweet and savory rice. The actual technique isn’t that bad, nor is it very time-consuming. If you’re trying sushi for the first time, like I did, pick two or three varieties to try, and don’t stress too much over the rice. In fact, dessert nigiri might be just the ticket. You can make it up pretty quickly, it’s light on rolling technique, and looks absolutely stunning.

And on that note, I’m going to leave you with the recipe for dessert sushi rice.

rice for dessert sushi

Adapted from Sushi with Style by Ellen Brown.

2 cups hot cooked medium-grain rice
1/3 cup cream of coconut — the kind you mix sweet drinks with
2 tablespoons rum

Whisk together the cream of coconut and rum in a small bowl. Put hot rice in a medium bowl. Sprinkle cream of coconut and rum mixture over the rice, and gently mix in to avoid breaking the grains.

Once it’s mixed together, carefully turn over small sections of the rice to help it cool and allow steam to escape. The rice is ready to use once it’s cooled enough that it’s not giving off any steam.

Suggestions: shape rice into rectangular nigiri shapes, and top with sliced fresh fruit such as mango or kiwi. “Glue” fruit to the rice using jam or nut butter. Top with candied ginger, sweetened flaked coconut, or sparkling sugar (sugar will melt; do this immediately before serving).