Gazpacho, Grilled Shrimp, and Apple Honey Yogurt

I love food. Especially whole foods. You will find no hot pockets in my freezer. I do have some emergency quick meals (frozen healthy dinners, canned soups, chili, etc), but my preference is to cook whole foods into a delicious meal. I will cover this more later, but I even make my own stock out of veggie tips. It’s hard to even put frozen food away because of the volume of frozen stock, bones, and vegetable tips makes my freezer impossibly full. My freezer is a different story altogether. Let’s focus on dinner tonight.

6 months or so ago, my gf of around 6 years and I decided to split. In the aftermath, I was lost on how to buy fresh food and cook for one as she was a cook by trade and had taken over the duties. And she was cooking for 2. Cooking for 1 with perishable fresh foods is a challenge, to say the least.

So I sought some help. I found something called <a href=”http://www.thefresh20.com/” target=_blank>The Fresh 20</a>, which promises a variety of weekly meal plans for a subscription, featuring 20 fresh items purchased every week, ranging from Kosher, Paleo, Vegetarian, and the one that caught my eye, For One. The ingredients are seasonal and reconfigured for every meal, so waste is kept minimal. This was the selling point for me, fresh food with minimal waste. I got a 1 month subscription and fell in love with it the unique and delicious flavors, so I signed up for a year and have loved it ever since.

I will likely cover the Fresh 20 as a whole and a review at a later time. Tonight, the fresh 20 recipe was grilled lemon shrimp, roasted gazpacho, and apple honey yogurt. Being 110 or hotter the last few weeks, I was WAY into a cool, fresh dinner like this.

I was, however, unimpressed with the mechanics of the gazpacho. Not the ingredients, but the how it was assembled. Specifically, the Fresh 20 recipe didn’t allow for enough time for the flavors to marry, IMHO. Living in a desert, gazpacho is such a needed relief from the heat, I take this shit really seriously.

So I consulted few other recipes, including Alton Brown, and adapted my recipe from the one from the Fresh 20. That is another thing I love about the Fresh 20, I can adapt recipes to my preference most of the time, since almost all of the ingredients are whole foods. So here is a rough estimate of my Gazpacho along with the Fresh 20 recipe for grilled shrimp and apple, Greek yogurt, and honey.

About 1 1/2 pounds fresh tomatoes, skinned and seeded. (boil water, drop 1 tomato in water for 30 seconds, remove from boiling water and drop into an ice bath which makes peeling the tomato trivial. Seeds forced through strainer to extract as much juice as possible)

• 3 small cloves of garlic
• 1/4 red onion
• 1/2 green bell pepper
• 6 shakes of Cholula Hot Sauce
• 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• salt
• fresh ground pepper
• 1 whole cucumber, skinned, seeded and diced
• 1 Tbsp Red Wine Vinegar
• Fresh Basil to Taste

Blend everything together except for the cucumber, vinegar, and basil. Do in small batches and add a little water if too thick. Refregirate for several hours for the flavors to marry. Add the cucumber and vinegar, then refrigerate for a bit longer. Add the basil, stir, and eat!

Traditionally, gazpacho is to be served with stale or crusty bread. I had plenty of food, so I skipped that, but you may well enjoy that.

While researching recipes and approaches to gazpacho, I found 1 piece of advice that said, if you don’t eat gazpacho in August, don’t eat it at all. Fresh tomatoes are KEY to a good gazpacho. Sugar is not needed to sweeten it if the tomatoes are very fresh. I know summer and August are done for 2015, but maybe you will have an excuse to try this recipe and enjoy it as much as I did.

Note#1: The grill marks would be better but I ran out of propane right when I put the damn shrimp on the barbie! I had to finish them off in the broiler.

Note#2 Yeah, that IS a lot of shrimp, but since I live in the desert, the ONLY fresh shrimp is frozen, I finished off a bag of frozen and it was much more than I expected.

Note #3 No, I didn’t eat all that. My best friend, Mr. Gizmo, helped me eat at least a half dozen shrimp. The gazpacho and yogurt apples were all mine, but I had no choice but to share the shrimp with my furry 4 legged friend.