Garden Gazpacho
It is officially gazpacho season. It’s not yet gazpacho season when you get your first summer tomato, but it is when you get another six after that — tomatoes so ripe, so juicy, so sweetnow, that you have to capture their flavors immediately. For me, the capture of summer’s bounty comes in the form of gazpacho.
In Tucson, the season of gazpacho begins when it hits 100; when it hits 100, I stop checking the weather — it is just hot — and start making gazpacho. It wasn’t until my second summer in Tucson that I tried making this cold tomato soup sourced from the plains of southern Spain, where the summer heat rivals even Tucson’s.
I’d been hesitant about gapzacho. Cold tomato soup? No thanks, I’d rather have a salad. But good gazpacho is so much better than a salad. For one, it’s like a salad in a blender — no chopping required! (Or, at least, very little, and with minimal consequence, as the blender corrects any errors.) And, unlike a salad, gazpacho elevates its ingredients through combination. A juicy tomato combines with a crisp bell pepper; an onion integrates with olive oil. Keep in mind you don’t want to create a tomato smoothie — you want to pulse your blender until the ingredients are integrated but still chunky.
Ode to Breakfast
I stumbled across this lovely little tale in an article about french toast in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing that you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.
If there is a way to express how I see the world, it would be this one. I believe in breakfast.
Big News!
Like, dream come true news.
Last week, I accepted an offer from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, to publish my book, Unprocessed.
Here’s the announcement from Publishers Marketplace:
Founding editor of Edible Baja Arizona Megan Kimble’s UNPROCESSED: My Busy, Broke, City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Food, the story of her year-long journey of eating only whole, unprocessed foods, intertwined with a journalistic exploration of what “unprocessed” really means, why it matters, and how to afford it, to Trish Daly at William Morrow by Mackenzie Brady at Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency (World).
Yup. That happened.
Fro yo fakery
Years ago, when I lived in Los Angeles, instead of meeting friends for coffee, we’d meet for fro yo. Self-serve frozen yogurt stores were had popping up like Starbucks—especially in the sunny, summerland of California. (Although it was in Little Rock, Arkansas that TCBY opened their first store, in 1981.) Frozen yogurt promises dessert without the consequence. Sweetness for only 25 calories an ounce! Peanut butter flavor without the peanut butter fat! If you’ve never been to a self-served frozen yogurt establishment, then you might not understand the cornucopia of sweetness available at the push of a lever. Pumpkin spice in October, gingerbread in November, peppermint in December. A dieter’s delight. [Read more…]
Ready, set…
Hello, blog! A little over two years ago, I set myself a challenge: I’d go an entire year without eating a processed food. Over the course of that year, as I explored our food system and how we processed food from land, I milled wheat, extracted salt from the sea, tempered chocolate, ate produce fresh off a semi truck at the U.S.-Mexico border, milked a goat, and slaughtered a sheep—all while earning an income that falls well below the federal poverty line.
This blog is a place for that exploration to continue. It is a place for humor and adventure, for travel and domesticity, but above all, it is a place for beginners. On the cusp of my food year, I’d never baked a loaf of bread. Never brewed alcohol, made cheese, or tended a garden. I loved food, of course, and so I liked to cook. But if the philosophy of my kitchen is “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” then the ethos of my unprocessed project might be, “Let’s see what happens.”