40 X 40: Make Green Gazpacho

 I somehow always manage to choose the food items off my yearly lists and this year's 40 x 40 is no exception.  Straight to the food items!  I have felt a master of the universe as far as red gazpacho goes, but had never tried a green gazpacho.  No green tomatoes here.  This is a solid base of spinach and cucumbers and green peppers and hearty bread.


 It comes from one of my most favorite cookbooks---Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi.  This London based Jerusalem transplant owns several restaurants and they all sound delicious.  On a whim, I tried to make a reservation at Ottolenghi a couple months out.  I thought, hey, if I can get a reservation, we will find a way to get to London this summer.  No go.  This guy is as popular as Momofuku or Per Se. 

What is so interesting about this vegetarian cookbook is that it is not arranged in the typical salad- soup-entree manner.  Instead, the various chapters are made up of different vegetables and vegetable families.  Almost all of the ingredients are readily available with maybe only a few items coming from your local southeast Asian or Middle Eastern market.   I also made the eggplant dish that is on the cover and it came out as beautiful as his picture!  His other book Jerusalem (co-authored with Sami Tamimi) has meat in it and is a fabulous book as well.  Another one that is already out in Europe is coming out in the states in September and I am already on the waiting list!

 

I took a nutrition class this year (post on this coming soon) and it made me really stop and think about what I am eating.  I know I cook a lot from scratch already and use a lot of whole foods and eat a lot of vegetables.  But the class really gave me an understanding of a plant based diet which led me further down the rabbit hole in terms of vegetarianism, even veganism.  (Is that a word?  I don't think so.)  Anyways, more posts coming on that as well but for now I just want to show you how delicious this green gazpacho was.  

 I was totally stressed because one of my husband's employees--vegetarian!---employee was coming over for dinner and usually I try to impress at my dinner parties with some big fancy meat thing so this was a little test for me to rearrange my thinking.

And it went off without a hitch!