Gazpacho and More in Cincinnati

I first wrote about gazpacho, the quintessential cold Spanish summer soup, in my earlier blog, Sundays in Spain. The first post, from 2009, was titled Gazpacho! and recounted how I learned that you never order gazpacho in Spain except in the summer time. The second, from 2011, had the same title, with slightly different punctuation: ¡Gazpacho!  I had obviously acquired a Spanish keyboard in the intervening years, and I could add the upside-down exclamation mark at the beginning of the title.

I was mortified that I had actually published two posts with the same title in one blog. Now I have searched back through Sundays in Spain to find references to those two posts so that I could link them in the paragraph above. Two interesting facts manifested themselves. First, the Google search engine on the Sundays in Spain blog was not able to find the 2011 ¡Gazpacho! post--probably because of the punctuation, and--with a new U.S.-style keyboard--I am unable to make the upside down exclamation mark. Since I was unable to find that post by searching for it, I decided to browse through all the posts that I had labeled "food" in that blog. The second interesting fact is that I wrote an awful lot about food during the six years I wrote that blog in Spain. Sixty-five posts to be exact! You might wonder whether I did anything else other than eat and drink and write about it!

Here I am now, in Cincinnati, in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of the summer season, and I am thinking and writing about gazpacho again. I have already had my first gazpacho of the season this year. That's because I have begun preparations for a special afternoon of tapas for a group of people from St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, to be held in two weeks. After much thought and discussion we have selected the menu, depending primarily on my memory and a cookbook called Classic Tapas: Authentic Spanish Recipes, translated into English (and other languages in other editions) but including the Spanish names and pictures.

Having selected various tapas, however, I had to learn how to make them. After all, as my trip through the 65 Sundays in Spain blogposts on food revealed, I had done a lot better at enjoying eating tapas than in preparing them myself. Among other things, we are having Spanish tortilla, paella, albóndigas (meatballs), and, of course, gazpacho. All things that are typical and that I have enjoyed often, but none of which I had ever actually prepared before. Tortilla and gazpacho are ready-made staples in most Spanish grocery stores, and that's exactly the method of preparation I had always used when serving them in my home. I never made albóndigas at home because they are almost always available as a tapa at a bar, and eating a tapas-sized portion is so much better for you than cooking a family-sized recipe for two people. Nor did I make paella at home the Spanish way (in a topless paella pan), because it was so much easier to have it out at a restaurant, prepared by experts, and also because I was sure, from many years of cooking, that you had to cook rice in a covered pan.

So it has been an adventure to find the recipes, locate the equivalent ingredients, and experiment making the various dishes for our tapas. In the last few weeks we have had a feast of Spanish evening meals and I have perfected my techniques for the upcoming afternoon of tapas. I even am comfortable now in cooking paella in a pan without a cover (my un-used paella pan being one of the few cooking utensils I brought back with me. We are holding a respite from eating Spanish for the next week or ten days, but I will then swing into full gear to prepare for the party. I might read through some of those 65 food posts from Sundays in Spain in the meantime, however, for vicarious enjoyment and inspiration. But I will not allow myself to change the menu!