Golden Gazpacho

If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be soup.

Wait...maybe it would be pizza.

But soup is a close second. I have a ton of soup recipes -- beef barley in the slow cooker, tortellini soup, butternut squash soup with sage and parmesan croutons. Cauliflower and stilton cheese soup, tomato gorgonzola soup, Italian wedding soup, coconut shrimp soup. The issue with these recipes and the summertime is that they are all, well, hot. And while Don is very patient when it comes to my experimental cooking, I try not to push my luck too much. So I am pretty much on soup hiatus in the summer months, except for my precious couple of cold soup recipes. I was very happy to run across this one, which not only is a lovely COLD soup, but also can be made in (I am not kidding about this) 10 minutes or under, depending on how fast a vegetable chopper you are. Most of the time involved in this recipe is chilling the soup. It says to chill it for at least two hours...I find that 15 minutes in the freezer and another 15 in the fridge will work just fine if you are too hungry to wait. And it involves no cooking whatsover. And it is so ridiculously healthy it can probably do push-ups all on its own.

Why is it golden, you ask? Well, the recipe calls for using all yellow heirloom tomatos. Those are a little hard to come by this early in the season, but Fairway (oh Fairway! have I told you lately that I love you???) had this nice little collection that worked just as well.

Between these and the carrot juice and the yellow squash, my version did turn out reasonably golden. The recipe calls for chopped avocado on top (I did have one of those) and chopped red tomato (oops! I used them all in the recipe and forgot to save one for the garnish). I did divert from the recipe to sprinkle some chopped salted pistachios on the top of mine (after I took the picture, but trust me, I added them and they were great). You can improvise further -- I might try chopped fresh basil next time, or maybe some fresh grated parmesan. Or both. Anyway, there is nothing like a good soup to make you feel happy. Good and good for you.
Here's the recipe.

GOLDEN GAZPACHO

Serves 4

• 2 pounds yellow heirloom tomatos, cored and quartered
• 1 small yellow onion, diced
• 1 medium yellow squash, halved lengthwise and thickly sliced
• 1 yellow bell pepper, ribs and seeds removed, cut into large chunks. (I left this out. See previous post on steak with summer squash to find out why)
• 1 thinly sliced garlic clove
• 1/2 cup carrot juice
• 2 tablespoons sherry wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• Coarse salt
• I avocado
• 1 small red tomato

1. In a blender, combine tomatos, onion, squash, pepper, garlic, carrot juice, vinegar and oil. Pulse until finely pureed. Season with salt. Refrigerate until well chilled, about 2 hours.

2. At serving time, halve, pit and dice avocado. Core and dice red tomato. Serve soup in chilled bowls topped with avocado, tomato and/or any other garnish that catches your fancy.

Note: all images can be enlarged by clicking on them.