Watermelon Gazpacho
I’m not sure there are two fruits more indicative of summer than watermelon and tomatoes. Is there anything better on a hot summer day than cracking open a watermelon and eating slices of it over the sink? Juice dripping down your chin, the crystals of sweet sugar bursting on your tongue, pausing only to dispatch seeds. Ah, summer. Unfortunately, it appears we just might be done with summer around here these days. The weather forecast for the next ten days doesn’t show one day over 70. We can pretend it’s summer a little while longer though by having watermelon gazpacho for lunch, even if we have to have it while wearing wool socks.
Serve topped with diced cucumbers and onions
Watermelon Gazpacho
Serves 6
Notes: Be careful when blending or food processing the watermelon. Don’t overfill the food processor as the watermelon will expand a bit once pureed. If you have a small food processor or blender, there’s no harm in blending a cup or two of ingredients at a time and then combining them at the end. If you want to blend them further, use an immersion blender in the large bowl.
I was a little surprised at the almonds in this recipe. Even though I used the immersion blender and our food processor, the almonds weren’t 100% pulverized, so the soup has a little bit of a texture. If you’re expecting a completely smooth soup, this won’t be for you, but if you don’t mind a bit of texture, I think you’ll really like the almonds. They also give the soup a bit of protein. I loved this gazpacho and if I can pick up another watermelon this weekend, I just might make it one more time before I let go of summer and pull out the sweaters and gloves.
We’re always on the lookout for new flavor combinations to pair with our existing dishes. One of our favorites of late is Zane and Zack’s new Jerk sauce. They often sell out of it, but if you ask at their Ballard Farmers Market booth on Sundays, they will usually be able to bring you a bottle next week. We’ve been brushing it on meats and fish with great results, but our most recent delight has come from tossing cooked chickpeas in the Jerk sauce and a little olive oil and roasting them at 400 for about 30 minutes, stirring once or twice.
We’ve also made roasted kabocha squash seeds with the jerk sauce and both have been outstanding snacks. Just another way to make an easy dish refreshing and new.
Coem back tomorrow for Watermelon Gazpacho!
A quick note on our posting frequency of late… we’ve been busy with canning, a few home improvement projects, and lots of work. We hope you’ll bear with us for another week or so. We’ll be back to our three recipes a week very soon!
Tuesdays are my very favorite day of the work week. I spend the day alone, running, working, tackling laundry, and cooking. This is the day I try to make dinner for my husband, and the day I use to try new recipes, like the red wine caramel that went into my coworker’s birthday apple pie.
Tuesdays are the days I often work with the cat purring on my lap, or with Great Big Sea rocking the house.
This Tuesday though, seemed to fly quicker than most. I looked up and the caramel sauce wasn’t done, the squash wasn’t roasted, and John was due home soon. So I got to work. I roasted a kabocha squash, intending to just soften it enough to easily chop it into cubes, but I got busy with the caramel sauce and it ended up about 3/4 of the way cooked. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but I was going to chop the squash into chunks and then caramelize it in olive oil, then mix it with some beef and beans we’d had the night before.
Since the squash was getting soft, I should have done something different with it. But tired, hungry, and distracted that I was, I just threw it in a pan with the beef and bean mixture, added some tomatoes, and cooked it until done.
It was ugly.
Seriously ugly.
It was orange, and brown, and very mushy.
But it was also delicious.
Comforting.
Almost exactly what I wanted.
All this is just a long winded way of saying that a delicious, healthy, and local meal doesn’t have to follow a recipe. Sometimes you need to be willing to experiment. Sometimes you’ll fail. But sometimes you’ll succeed. I knew that combining kabocha squash, beef, and beans, all of which are rather simple flavors, would likely work well. I knew that the dish would need some bite to it, so hence, the tomatoes.
But my point is that sometimes you need to experiment. Soups and stews are my preferred experimentation vectors. They are generally very forgiving. Start with three or four ingredients. Simmer for a bit. If it tastes good, stop. If it’s not quite there, try some salt and pepper or some seasonings. Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s always a backup plan, and sometimes that plan is takeout!
Happy experimentation.
Simple Salmon with Roasted Vegetables
This is a simple weeknight meal that we’ve made a couple of times in the past few weeks. It’s flexible, easy, and since most of the time for this recipe is the cooking time, which is largely unattended, it’s the perfect dish for busy nights when you need to do some work or house cleaning (or baseball game watching) while dinner cooks.
A few words about the ingredients for this dish. The must-haves are the salmon, the olive oil, and the cherry tomatoes. Everything else is optional and you should feel free to add other vegetables depending on your preferences. Do you like roasted beets? Add them (but be prepared for a very reddish dish). Hate fennel? Leave it out. Carrots, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, garlic… all good. You could probably even make this dish with extra firm tofu instead of salmon. This dish takes about 10 minutes of active work and 40 minutes for cooking. It’s a one dish, one spoon, and one knife meal, making cleanup a breeze.
Salmon with Roasted Vegetables
Notes: This is such a versatile dish. You can use pretty much any vegetables you have on hand, but I urge you not to skip the cherry tomatoes. They soften and infuse the whole dish with such a fantastic sweetness. You could use full sized tomatoes, but sometimes the skin on them is a bit too thick to be palatable. The flavor of the fennel softens so if you don’t much care for fennel in salads, give it a try here. This dish would be great with tofu if you’re looking for a vegan alternative.
One last tip about salmon: when cooking, if you see the white stuff that oozes out the top and sides of salmon, don’t panic. That white stuff is called albumin and it’s a protein that you see when a piece of salmon has exceeded the perfect level of doneness. It’s edible. In theory, a piece of salmon should be cooked until just before the albumin becomes visible. But, for those of you new to cooking salmon, or those who like their salmon a tad bit more done, just cook it until you start to see some albumin. It’s an easy visual cue that lets you know when to take your salmon out of the oven. As you can see from the photographs, I let our salmon cook just about 2 minutes too long. However, since the center was so thick, that made for a very moist piece of fish with just a tad bit less moisture towards the edges. Since you have a good amount of roasting liquid from the vegetables though, you don’t have to worry about drying out your fish.
Wednesday night, I tried a little experiment. I live-tweeted the dinner I made. I did this for a few reasons, but one of them was that I wanted to show that while I don’t believe that everyone can cook every night, I do believe that anyone can cook any night. I know, that’s a little confusing. You see, now and then around the Interwebs, I see folks discussing whether it is possible to cook dinner every night. Some people feel that it is simply a matter of priorities. If you make it a priority to cook healthy delicious meals for your family every day, then you’ll be able to do it. Other people feel that the ability to do this limited to folks with plenty of resources (money and/or time) or those for whom an adult member of the family doesn’t work outside the home. I’m really in a camp halfway between the two.
You see, I’m super busy. I work a full time job (albeit one that allows me to work from home when I want to) and I run a business. Sure, my business is cooking related, but it is very much a second job as I spend anywhere from 8-20 hours a week on it outside of the actual cooking processes. My husband works full time as well. We also work out for between 60 and 90 minutes five days a week and between 2 and 3 hours on day 6. In short, we’re swamped most of the time. Our clean laundry sits in the laundry basket for a week. Our parking strip is full of dandelions. I have a knitting box full of yarn and no time to knit. But on a busy day, one where we arrived home at 6:15pm, I had a healthy, local, and delicious dinner on the table at 7:30, and had plenty of time in between to clean my stove, clean out part of the fridge, harvest some food from our garden, and work for about 20 minutes searching for canning recipes for this coming weekend.
Can I do this every night? Absolutely not. Tomorrow’s dinner is likely going to be leftovers from Tuesday. Reheating will take 10 minutes. Friday, since I’ll be canning in the late afternoon, I’m betting we’re getting takeout. I still haven’t put that laundry away and I have an iPhone development book staring me in the face and mocking me. But given the following assumptions, I can cook a local meal at least 4 days a week.
So, no, I don’t think it’s feasible to cook a fresh meal every night, even for me, an experienced cook. Partially because the cooking process isn’t all you have to think about.
You have planning, and shopping, and making sure that the dishes are done so there’s empty counter space for prep, and making sure that you have the necessary pots, pans, and dishes. Then there’s the prep work, and the actual cooking, and then the cleaning up afterwards. So cooking a single meal requires a lot more time than just the time you spend cooking. If you’re not a confident cook, or have dietary restrictions, or your family hates most vegetables, this can be a daunting task.
In order to help folks become comfortable with some easy, healthy, local meals, over the next few months, I’m going to be live tweeting a meal every couple of weeks. This time it was done on a whim, but next time I’ll give you a few days warning and an ingredient list if you want to play along at home. I’ll tweet the steps in real time, with photos. The recipe will be posted the next day. All meals will have a start-to-finish time of less than an hour and will include at least a protein and significant vegetable component. We’ll get to the recipe in the next post, but for now, here’s the twitter stream from Wednesday’s event.
Live-Tweeting Dinner
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