Olive Bread

I can count the number of times that I've baked bread on one hand. I'm looking forward to baking new and exciting breads with my new Christmas present (a bread machine). Recently, as photographed, I baked a bread that was half white and half brown (I ran out of white flour) with olive oil and pimento-stuffed olives. I added some thyme to it as well. It was great with extra olive oil and some balsamic vinegar.

 

Gazpacho

I haven't tried adding bread to gaspacho before, but onions I have, and I can tell you: it didn't taste good. Both are more or less traditional ingredients for this chilled, refreshing Spanish soup. These days I just include generally green salad ingredients.

Ingredients:

6 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped

1/2 cucumber, chopped

1 tsp crushed garlic

1 red bell pepper, chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

Salt & pepper to taste

Method:

Get your blender out. Blend. Serve chilled with parsley leaves and a good bread. Enjoy thoroughly and pretend you are in a Spanish landscape painting.

Get some insight:

Apparently gaspacho, the food of shepards and peasant of old, even goes back to Roman times in a very basic form: bread, water, vinegar, oil and salt. That sounds more like a sauce. Today there are quite a few variations from that root. When we were in Spain we bought some of the red variety, which is more well known, in a one liter carton and drank it just like that for lunch. We should have kept an eye out for the cousins: green and white.

While the red variety is tomato based, white ones can contain nuts and dried fruits and the green ones are basically the same as the white but contain spices that make them colourful. Something new to try! Nuts in a soup!