Gazpacho and Love
It’s past midsummer here, and even though we live in the middle of Los Angeles, my husband I have a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grow tomatoes, strawberries, basil, and other herbs in Earth Boxes in our backyard. And blueberries in a wine barrel on wheels. It’s my small nod to having grown up on a farm in Wisconsin, my yearly science project to give my kids some connection to where food comes from, and another excuse to futz around the yard on weekends. Last year we had a bumper crop of basil, and because my husband is an obliging cook, he made pesto by the bucket. I love pesto, but it became a little bit like that children’s book, Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban, where I was had my fill of pesto for the next several months. This year we had only enough basil for one huge batch of pesto before the plants became diseased, toughened, and went to seed. But we made the rookie mistake of planting all of the tomato seedlings at once, and now we are overloaded with tomatoes. At first we were joyfully welcomed by friends as we presented gallon Ziploc bags of tomatoes to them. Now even our friends weary of our tomato offers.
My husband, the unofficial cook* in our house (and this year, the gardener, after he grew sick of my insistence in late March that soon, very soon, I would plant all those seedlings I’d bought from the garden store), has come up with some delicious uses for our tomatoes. After we were at an outdoor dinner party where we ate gazpacho, I raved to the cook about how much I loved it. (Really, like creme brûlée, and its pudding-family relatives like flan, and an old-fashioned, non-light caesar salad, there’s hardly a gazpacho I’ve tasted that I don’t like.) One of my husband’s creations is a hybrid creation of cold tomato soup recipes he’s found that use avocado as the “cream” agent (we also have an avocado “problem,” since I wisely/unwisely subscribed to a local CSA ( in an attempt to eat more in-season produce and patronize farmers’ markets without the headache of driving to them).
I’d been talking about gazpacho all summer, and upon hearing me wax on to our friend the cook about how hard it was to find gazpacho and how much I love it, my husband jotted down the recipe. A few days later, he began the great gazpacho experiment (only an experiment because the first batch was way too salty). And along with the other tomato soups he’s created, the gazpacho is a delicious solution to our backyard urban produce glut. It’s an act of preventing waste, sure, but it’s also an act of love.
And I don’t know if this influences him or not, but the first time I tried gazpacho was when I was visiting an old boyfriend’s house. I was still a teenager, and my boyfriend’s parents had one of the most romantic marriages I’d ever seen, especially for “old” people (they were probably in their late 40s). They openly swooned over one another, and there were anniversary cards and birthday cards on shelves, where one declared love for the other in flowery, embarrassing (for me) and unabashed terms. Coming from a family with a single mother who never dated, this was totally foreign. And in fact, I have never fallen in love with anyone who writes me over-the-top romantic sentiments. With my father (who never remarried after my parents’ divorce, probably due to mental illness, but still) and my grandfather (a farmer who lived alone for most of his marriage and resumed his solitary life after becoming a widower) as my childhood models for manliness, I tend to fall for the intensely private, sensitive types, the opposite of serial monogamists. At one late August meal, these mooney-eyed parents of the boyfriend I would date for only a short time, the mother served gazpacho. As he did at every meal, the father exclaimed that it was delicious and that she was brilliant.
I loved the soup. But it also became one of the flavors of romantic love.
* I cook, it’s true, but it’s too often a utilitarian, joyless affair performed while multitasking other quotidian chores. I wish it wasn’t so, but it is.
