Food

There is nothing I love more than gazpacho soup on a hot day. It’s refreshing and cool, flavorful and filling. This is a recipe that I adore, and I hope you’ll enjoy trying it out over the hot August nights. I like to serve this with fresh salad shrimp just popped in, right before serving. Bonus points if they’re just shy of frozen, keeping the soup chilled as it hits the table!

Ingredients:

▢ 1½ lbs red heirloom or beefsteak tomatoes OR 1½ lbs canned whole tomatoes
▢ 1 cucumber, peeled, plus more diced for garnish
▢ 1 orange bell pepper, seeded and cored
▢ juice of half a lemon
▢ ½ shallot
▢ 2 cloves garlic
▢ 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
▢ 1½ tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
▢ 1 tablespoon kosher salt
▢ fresh cracked pepper, garlic salt, dried onion, Worcestershire sauce, to taste
▢ fresh basil, parsley, cilantro, jalapeno peppers, and lemon slices (optional)

If you prefer skinless tomatoes, you can blanch them in a pot of boiling water for about 40 seconds, or until the skin begins to peel off. Remove the skin. If you like the skin on, simply skip this step (this is my preference).

Dice tomatoes, bell pepper and cucumber into similar sized pieces. Place half of them in the blender with the shallot, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and salt. Liquefy until smooth. Pour the liquid into a glass container, and stir in the remaining diced vegetables. If you want to use the fresh herbs and jalapeno pepper, they can either be minced and added into the blender, or put directly into the soup, depending on your preference. If you find that the soup is not “soupy” enough, you can add some plain tomato juice until it is a good consistency. Refrigerate the soup for at least 3 hours, or overnight if you can. This allows the flavors to blend.

Serve in chilled bowls, topped with fresh minced herbs, lemon slices, jalapeno pepper rounds, and/or croutons. A splash of high quality virgin olive oil in each bowl will add a depth of flavor as well.

My father’s side of the family is from Communist Hungary. I grew up on Hungarian foods, and learned several recipes that I have passed on to friends and family today. This recipe is straight from my Nagymama’s (that means “grandma” in Hungarian) kitchen, this recipe has the flavor of Hungary throughout it. The meat is tender, the broth tasty, and on a cold, winter day, nothing beats it! Remember that the delicate flavor of good, traditional goulash comes from a fine quality Hungarian paprika – look for the Szekezed label, which comes in a metal cannister in the spice sections of many grocery stores. There are usually two types available: hot and sweet. Both have a sweet flavor to them, but the hot one is QUITE hot. For this recipe you want the sweet one, although if you like your goulash to have a bit of bite, you can mix in some of the hot paprika, too!

Ingredients for goulash:

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Bread is often called the “staff of life,” and that’s because a man can survive on bread and water. We think of this, in today’s world of Wonderbread and fake food, as a cruel punishment. In medieval times, bread and water was fairly standard fare for a person. In the 1750s, bread was 60% of the average colonist’s daily food intake. Today, that would be considered outrageous and possibly dangerous. Then, the wheat was whole, and even when finely ground (very doable along the many rivers in water-powered mills), it contained all of the natural protein and fat of the kernel.

This recipe is one that I’ve developed on my own. It’s a blend of several recipes that I’ve worked on over the years. It combines a pain de mie recipe, a no-knead recipe that I love, and the “beginner’s loaf”  from a book of Chris’s, Bread Alone. It’s the culmination of about 20 years of practice, learning, failures, successes, and surprises as I learned enough about bread baking to casually consider teaching myself to use a wood fired beehive oven at the Fort.

This is not an easy recipe. It is a simple recipe, however. The beginner bread recipe I mention above is the best place to go for instructions on how to bake bread. If you do what the authors tell you, you will eventually make amazing loaves of bread, every time. It will take a few years of practice, though, and you will probably make up new swear words as you go along. This recipe here, is not as difficult as the beginner loaf, but will not teach you as much about baking as you make it. I heartily encourage you to make it entirely by hand at least a half dozen to a dozen times before indulging in the use of a MixMaster or other bread making machine. Getting your hands onto fresh dough is good for you mentally, and the resulting bread will feed you physically and spiritually. There’s definitely something “more than human” about creating a loaf of bread.

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Back in May, I decided to attempt a new recipe while out in the field, cooking over a fire at a Renaissance Faire. I do this a couple of times a year, when I know I have time to play with new things. Not all fairs allow me the time to pay attention to details, and so quite a lot of the time I stick with a standard rotation of recipes. But this was a new fair, and one which I had no other responsibilities at. I was just there to cook and talk about history, and maybe sell a few cookbooks. So I picked a new one, and ran with it.

The result was incredibly delicious. I had people trying to steal pieces off of each other’s plates. They scraped the bottom of my dutch oven with bits of bread, to be certain they’d eaten every last drop. It was an impressive sight, to say the least. It seems to me, this makes a wonderful first recipe for my weekly recipe post.

To make Alloes of beef

Take lene beef and cut hym in thyn pecys and lay hit on A borde then take sewet of motton or of beef and herbys and onyons hackyd small to gether then straw thy leshes of beef with powder of pepur and a lytell salt and strew on thy sewet and the herbys. And rolle them up ther yn put them on a broche and roste them and serue them up hote. — Transcription of original receipt (Source: MS Pepys 1047)

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