Tag Archives: wine

Gazpacho

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A nice summer soup.

GazpachoMike is a huge fan of gazpacho, a tomato-based, chilled vegetable soup. We’ve tried a bunch of recipes and, as usual, have come up with our own variation. I just made a batch today; we’ll have it for dinner tonight.

Ingredients:

  • 4 large ripe tomatoes
  • 2 medium cucumber
  • 1 medium pepper. Most people use green peppers, but I prefer yellow or orange, which have a milder flavor and don’t make me burp peppers for the next six hours. Today we had 1/2 of each leftover from another meal, so that’s what I used.
  • 4 green onions. If you like a sharper onion flavor, use 1 small onion or 1 medium sweet onion.
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar. Mike really likes b-vinegar.
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1/8 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
  • Tabasco (if desired) to taste. We don’t use this; we prefer a mello gazpacho.

Preparation Instructions:

  1. Chop the first 4 ingredients. Put half of each in a blender or food processor (we use a blender) and the other half in a mixing bowl.
  2. Add remaining ingredients to the blender or food processor.
  3. Puree until very smooth. The mixture should have a pinkish color.
  4. Add pureed mixture to mixing bowl with chopped ingredients. Mix well.
  5. Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours but not more than 3 days.
  6. Enjoy cold.

And if you see a gazpacho recipe that looks good to you but includes bread and water, just omit the bread and water. (The idea of including soaked bread in a soup really grosses me out.) As you’ll see, you don’t need bread to make the soup hearty and delicious.

Sheridan, MT

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At a friend’s ranch.

My August 2005 road trip (which still hasn’t made it to this blog), took me all over the northwest. On the way back, I decided to stop in and visit our friend Lynn. Her husband, Ray, had been partners with Mike (my husband) on a Grumman Tiger airplane. At the time, Ray and Lynn lived in town. They decided to move — or maybe Lynn did — and they bought a house on some acreage in Sheridan, MT.

I arrived at Lynn’s doorstep after a very long day in the car. I’d started at McCall, ID and had driven along one scenic road after another. In Idaho, most roads don’t run east to west. They run north to south between mountain ranges. (Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.) So I did a lot of zig-zagging up and down the state of Idaho before crossing the Continental Divide at Chief Joseph Pass.

I’d been told that Ray and Lynn’s house was in Dillon, MT, so that’s where I headed. When I got there and called for directions, I learned that I was still about 30 miles away. I finally found the place in the foothills of the Tobacco Root Mountains, near the Beaverhead National Forest.

Sheridan, MTLynn got me settled in and we had some wine by one of the two creeks that flowed past her house. Then we went for a walk in her alfalfa field. This is the view from the end of the field, looking back toward her house.

I can’t remember how many acres they have there, but I can remember the color: green. There was a lot of water in the area and with the right irrigation equipment, they were able to grow two crops of alfalfa a year. That was more than enough than they needed for their horses (which graze in a separate field). So they hired a guy to cut the alfalfa twice a year. He gets half the crop for payment and they sell the other half to pay their annual property tax bill. Nice.

I spent a wonderful night there, listening to the water flow by outside my window.

Asian Martini

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For unwinding on a lazy weekend afternoon, when driving (or flying) is not in your immediate future.

Ingredients

  • 3 oz premium vodka – don’t use junk liquor; you’ll be drinking this almost straight
  • splash of plum wine – for an extra dry version of this drink, use a teaspoon; if you’re the kind who likes white zinfandel wine, make that a generous splash
  • ice – I use cubes, but that’s because I don’t have patience to wait for the icemaker to crush the ice

Mixing Instructions

  1. Add all ingredients to a martini shaker (with strainer).
  2. Shake for 60 seconds.
  3. Pour through strainer into chilled martini glass.

Enjoy.

BTW, in some Japanese restaurants a 50-50 mix of vodka and plum wine served over ice is known as a Samarai. It’s a killer drink and not intended for the designated driver.