Here's a "recipe" for the pasta sauce I made for dinner tonight!

• 1 big jar of the stewed and reduced garden tomatoes that your mom put up last summer
• 1 can of diced tomatoes, or some fresh ones if they're ready
• huge dollop of olive oil
• several cloves of garlic... I dunno, four? six?
• some diced onion, call it a double-handful; preferably from the garden, but mix in some of that store-bought one if you gotta
• a handful of diced bell pepper
• a big ol' double-handful of various herbs from the garden, including three types of thyme, plenty of rosemary, fresh basil, and some of that oregano that's integrated itself into the lawn and is now impossible to get rid of, not that you'd want to
• about a palmful of ground cumin
• a spritz of red pepper flakes
• two or three generous sprinkles of ground cinnamon
• several fat pinches of salt

Heat up the olive oil in a pot; use the garlic press on the garlic, because this house happens to have one and we're in a hurry. Dice and chuck in the onion as the garlic starts to bubble, then roughly chop or tear all the herbs except the basil and pitch them in, along with the cumin, red pepper, and cinnamon. Add the bell pepper whenever you can be bothered to. Stir around, let the onions get translucent. Dump in last year's reduced tomatoes, use a fork or a slotted spoon to get the diced tomatoes in there without too much of that water, add the basil. Stir, bring to slow boil, simmer. When it's pretty much done, salt to taste.

Hot damn, I’m loving these lentil + brown rice cakes. Time to share:

Lentil Rice Cakes

Simple Foods for the Pack, by Vikki Kinmont and Claudia Axcell. (First edition, 1976.)

Makes about a dozen.

• 2/3 cup brown rice
• 1/3 cup lentils [ed: I’ve only made these correctly with the red kind.]
• 3 cups water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 small onion, chopped fine
• 1 small carrot, grated
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 tablespoon parsley, minced [ed: I don’t think we’ve EVER had parsley around for these.]
• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 tsp. tamari soy sauce

Season with one of the following:
* 1 tsp. cumin, ground
* 1/2 teaspoon rosemary, ground
* 1/8 teaspoon cloves, ground

[I overspice these with cumin, cayenne, and garam masala, because that’s how I roll. You can also add some shredded ginger, and some other veggies, but don’t go overboard, because cohesion is important.]

Cook the rice and lentils in water with salt, for about 45 minutes (all water should be absorbed), and allow to cool. [You want it thick. The last little while, you’ll have to take the lid off and stir constantly. You’re done when there are big, goop-flinging explosions bubbling up, even on low heat.]

Mash well with hands, then add rest of ingredients and mix well. Form into patties, place on cookie sheet, and bake at 300° for 30-45 minutes. Turn once to allow underside to cook. [The flipping process is always really tetchy. Wait until they’re at least 2/3 done before trying, and if the patties break apart, put ‘em back in for a while before trying again. There will still probably be some really goopy stuff on the bottom that sticks to your spatula, but there’s nothing for it; just scrape it off and put it back.]

Ideally, serve with hummus or lemon-tahini dressing.

Greg and I got together tonight last night and made some damn gazpacho. Science hasn't yet devised a cure for 90-degree weather, but I tell you what, gazpacho and baguette and beer with your friends makes for a very humane treatment.

Oh, and I have a blender now, courtesy of Steeple People. I think it needs some lubrication, because you could definitely smell it working harder than it should have been working. Nevertheless, it did a heroic job on our ingredients, leaving us with basically the most perfect gazpacho we could have asked for. Plus it totally fits in with my kitchen kitsch fetish. Oh yeah, baby—goldenrod. Pictures later.

So how do you make gazpacho, much less perfect radiant hero gazpacho? Well, I relied on this recipe and this one for shopping advice, but we basically freestyled it, and ended up with LOTS of leftovers. We probably could have fed four or five people.

Let's do this one backwards:

Gazpacho Avec Whatever

Directions:

1. Cut some fresh tomatoes* into little cubes and set aside.
2. Blend up everything else in a blender. (Cut it into slightly smaller pieces first, but don't sweat it too hard, it's just going to end up in a blender.) Do it in batches, including enough tomato juice in each blenderload that it all comes out liquid without causing you any grief. Then stir it all together in a big ol' plastic or glass mixing bowl.**
3. Stir in those diced tomatoes.
4. Put the whole thing in the fridge (covered) and let it chill for at least twenty minutes. The longer it waits, the better it gets, peaking at somewhere around the "overnight" mark. Don't sweat it too hard, though; half the point is leftovers.
5. Serve. You can put some parsley and fresh thyme on top, if you want. Go ahead and have some baguette and beer, too. Don't worry about protein: that's for morning, when you don't feel like sweating your internal organs out. Tonight, we party.

Ingredients (most of which are optional and all of which are fungible):

• The aforementioned fresh tomatoes.
• A big jar of really good unsweetened tomato juice. You can get the 32oz jar of the R.W. Knudsen stuff for 3 bucks at the co-op in the juices section. Do spring for the decent stuff, because it is seriously the ingredient that makes or breaks your soup. V8 is for when you're A.) at 15,000 feet or B.) too drunk or dehydrated to tell the difference.
• Several cloves of garlic. Hardcore fresh. It ought to smell juicy and sharp, not musky and dusky.
• A big, sweet-ish white or yellow onion.
• A jalepeño.
• A milder green pepper. Bells work, but only if they come from someone you know; if you're just buying from the store or the co-op, spring for a poblano or something; I don't think they sell edible bells in stores anymore.
• Half a stalk of rhubarb (impulse buy. I'm convinced it did something magical).
• Two or one stalks of celery.
• A cucumber.***
• Some parsley!
• Some fresh lemon thyme.
• Some fresh basil.
• Some chili powder.
• Some vinegar (wine vinegar is probably good, but we just used rice vinegar and it turned out fab).
• A splash or three of lemon juice (as always, the good stuff in the glass bottle—trust me, you'll find something to do with the rest of it.) (Or, you know, just use some lemon).
• A pinch or three of salt.
• A pinch or three of coarse black pepper.
• A huge dollop of decent olive oil. (We totally forgot about this.)
• Some hotsauce. (Several drops. We skipped this, too.)

_____
* If they don't smell like pure moonshined summer when you hold them four inches from your face, just leave 'em out of the recipe entirely. Local, in-season tomatoes are a sensory adventure, but the second-best thing is high-end packaged stuff that was picked and parsed at the right time of year. Plasticky long-haul shipping tamaters are only suitable for shitty burgers.
** I am told that stainless steel and other metals are a serious no go. Something to do with acids and corrosion and your soup tasting like metal.
*** Holy shit, this is NOT "it's safe to buy a cucumber at the co-op" season. TWO BUCKS FIFTY FOR ONE DAMN CUCUMBER. If I'd been in less of a hurry and watching the prices, I'd have just hit one of the Nicollet Asian groceries on the way home. Damn.