Gazpacho

If I had more time at home I would spend considerably more time outside growing a great vegetable garden. I love to prepare and share fresh picked local veggies and what better place than from your own back (or front) yard. Since I spend a great deal of time traveling for work it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a vegetable garden. I do grow some low maintenance winter squash and kale, but my real passion is for heirloom tomatoes. Over 10 years ago I started to grow them in a plastic Home Depot greenhouse using tomato starts from local Metchosin farm stands. Since then I have collected my own seeds, enlarged my greenhouse and I get started on my own seedlings every January.

Delicious raw ingredients

By September we are swimming in 6-10 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. What do we do with this great abundance of tomatoes? Well, almost every day we have tomato salad, we share them with friends and family, they get frozen whole, we make tomato sauce for pizza or pasta, and I make gazpacho. To me gazpacho captures the essence of summer. Colourful heirloom tomatoes from my greenhouse; cucumbers, garlic, shallots, and peppers from my favorite local farmers; all swimming in organic tomato juice and topped off with the best olive oil from Tuscan Kitchen on Broad Street. It is so very delicious!

In early September I made a great batch of gazpacho for a Saturday night dinner party. I gathered a great selection of tomatoes: Aunt Rubies German Green, White Ghost (actually yellow), Black from Tula (dark mahogany), Green Zebras and Peach Zebras.

The tomatoes were chopped into 1/4 inch dice, then were joined by fuzzy cucumbers and shallots from Windwhipped Farm, garlic from Sea Bluff Farm and peppers from the Wulff’s. It looks so beautiful in a big chrome bowl before adding the tomato juice, but after a day of resting in the fridge it looks even better in our bowls!

Gazpacho