Suddenly Frugal Blog

When I lived in my old house, we had a small vegetable garden along the southern wall of the home, where we grew tomatoes, zucchini and pumpkins. I can still remember how at a certain point in the growing season, ripe-red tomatoes seemed to appear on the vine seemingly overnight. At first I loved this tomato bounty, but after awhile, I got to the point where I was begging my neighbors to please take some tomatoes. I simply couldn’t use them all, and I didn’t want them to go to waste.

These days I don’t have a vegetable garden (though I’m hoping to plant one next year in that newly discovered sunny spot in our yard), but I do have our CSA farm. And Thursdays are the days that we go to pick up our share, and I’ve got to be honest with you–I’m not looking forward to it. Or at least I wasn’t until last night.

You see, we’re at that same point in the growing season where there are just simply too many tomatoes to deal with each week. And I split my CSA share three ways, and I still have more tomatoes that a family of four can eat. I’m also overloaded on peppers–jalapeno, chile and habanero. So the idea of heading out to the farm again to get more tomatoes and peppers today just wasn’t very appetizing.

Luckily I was standing around with the other soccer moms at our daughters’ practice last night, and we started talking about what you do when you get so many tomatoes. One mom talked about freezing them (I still haven’t figured out how you do this without ruining the tomatoes) and another talked of making homemade tomato sauce (I’ll leave that to my husband, the Italian, who learned to make sauce when he was knee-high to his grandfather. Yes, that’s right, the Italian men in his family make the sauce. It’s one of the reason’s I fell in love with him). I happened to mention to a third mom, who is a part of our CSA share, that I was just dying to make salsa–especially since I’ve got some ripe peaches lying around, and I love fruit salsas–and that mom told me how she’d thrown a bunch of her vegetables into the food processor and made a gazpacho-like salsa. This sounded so delicious that I couldn’t wait to get home and give this idea a whirl in my own food processor.

Here is what I ended up with, in case you’re interested in trying this recipe:

Fruit Gazpacho with a Kick

1 medium sized peach, pitted and peeled, cut into quarters
2 large tomatoes, cored and cut into quarters
1/2 large onion
1 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
1 habanero pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 tablespoon fresh cilantro, chopped
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
pinch salt (to taste)
pinch pepper (to taste)

Dump all the ingredients into a food processor and blend until thick soup texture with small chunks of vegetables are still visible

Serve in bowl with dollop of fat-free plain yogurt (it helps to cut the kick).

While my intentions were good for salsa, what I ended up with was a gazpacho with a kick (thus the title) that made an awesome appetizer to last night’s dinner. My husband thinks that this gazpacho would also work in an enchilada, so we’re probably going to try that with another dinner this week. And it was all “free” because I had all of the ingredients on hand.

What’s even better is that no vegetables went to waste this past week. In fact, I’m all ready to load up on tomatoes and peppers again today. Now to figure out how I’ll use them this in different recipes this coming week. Ideas?