What's the time? It's FOODZEIT: asparagus gazpacho

Gazpacho plated up with croutons

Honestly, sometimes I ask myself what to cook when you have to watch football till late in the night? It’s in the middle of the summer, it’s really hot during the day, I have been cleaning the kitchen the whole day, the game comes up soon and I still have to cook. As I am alone, why cook something special and not just order some food? Because I owe it to my body and because I want something special. Easy, no? But I don’t want to spend hours and hours in the kitchen to just eat it up in five minutes. So the real question is, what to cook when you are in such a mood? I always have the perfect recipe for these kind of moments - a gazpacho. This cold Spanish tomato soup is easy to make as I don’t have to cook anything, just blend everything together and it is also the perfect food for a hot summer evening like this as this cold soup is light, fresh and cool. But today I got some asparagus left and so I created a new kind of a gazpacho, an asparagus gazpacho. It’s really refreshing and it’s something I will make more often and I really like the complementary taste of those veggies. Here is goes:

Ingredients:

4 tomatoes
400 g fresh asparagus
½ cucumber
1 red bell pepper
½ yellow bell pepper
2 cloves of garlic
1 onion
3 spoons of bread crumbs
Salt and pepper to taste
2 Table spoon of balsamic vinegar
4 Table spoon of extra virgin olive oil
2 cubes of frozen ice cubes or vegetable stock (I always have some frozen cubes of veggie stock in my fridge, it’s an easy and convenient way to have the right portions ready for cooking
Two slices of old bread

First we peel and cut the asparagus in 3 equal pieces. Then we cook it for 15 – 20 minutes in salt water and take it out when it’s nice and tender. The boiling water can be used to pour it over the tomatoes in order to peel the skin off. Then we peel and roughly dice all the ingredients and keep a third of them for decoration later, the other two third go in the blender. Blend until everything is smooth and put the soup in the fridge. When the soup is really cold, we can serve up. First I make some croutons by cutting the old bread slices in squares and fry them in a hot pan with some butter till they are brown and crispy. Then we serve the soup in some bowl, put two or three cubes of frozen veggies stock in the soup so it is really, really cold. Then put the croutons in the soup and decorate the plate with the veggies and we are ready to go for tonight’s match.
A word at the end. I am making gazpacho but it’s got nothing to do with Spain loosing again Holland so miserably. That was just because they played so poorly. 5 – 1! Really? I still will enjoy my Spanish German fusion soup…