Jul 06 2009
Hot Town, Summer in the City
Last Thursday night was possibly the hottest I ever remember in Edinburgh. Not so much the heat at the peak of the day- in fact if I recall correctly it wasn’t that spectacular at lunch- but the way that when I left work at 6pm the wall of heat as I stepped outside was like being in the Mediterranean. We walked home from a trip to the pub at midnight and then it felt like 4pm temperature. I am loving this whole ‘actually getting a summer’ malarky- and I don’t care that every day of sunshine seems to need to be followed by torrential rain :o)
As it was so hot there was no way I was cooking, so I cast my mind back to a recipe that Dougal and I last ate the nights we both Graduated. June 2005 had some similarly hot nights; on both days we’d eaten huge lunches but wanted a little something to see us through to bed time. I happened upon the Gary Rhodes short cut recipe for Gazpacho- tinned or bottle roasted peppers, tin of tomatoes, some chopped up cucumber and garlic and bread crumbs all blitzed up in the food processor with some olive oil and red wine vinegar. Chill, and serve with all the requisite bits.
We didn’t have this quite as cold as it ought to have been (the problem being that all the ingredients were at room temperature, which on Thursday was more like blood temperature) and this time I felt the flavours were a bit intense. Perhaps a handful of ice cubes would have cooled it down and lessened the over powering nature of the flavours. Either way this has been a great hot night meal in the past and I’m sure we’ll come back to it in the future!
Beautiful pictures!
indeed… worth trying, then?
coo…. and a sixties reference to chime in with all that moony stuff.
not intentional…whilst everyone else is going ‘coo, is it 40 years since the moon landings?’ i’m going ‘coo, is it ten years since we saw R.E.M. at Stirling Castle?’