Amy's Food Adventures

The Cold Soups of Summer

All summer long we buzz up cold soups in the blender and enjoy them as dinner first courses, lunches, or just snacks. Our favorites are not only easy to make, they're delicious and fairly low in fat and calories.

Gazpacho, our style, is our all-time favorite. It's also the easiest. Put 24 ounces of V-8 or Tomato Juice into the blender and add (all coarsely cut up) one tomato, one red onion, peeled, 2 cloves of garlic, peeled, a big handful of parsley, and a peel and seeded cucumber. (My habit is to peel the cucumber, cut it lengthwise into quarters, zip out the seeds with four quick cuts, and stand the long slices up in the blender.) I then add 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil (more if you like), 2-3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire Sauce, and about 6 good shakes of Tabasco Sauce. You shouldn't need salt or pepper because the sauces have those ingredients in abundance. Buzz it for a few minutes and serve in bowls with croutons. (Home-made is best of course, but we usually settle for Pepperidge Farm's.)

Almost equally popular at our house is a Yogurt Cucumber Soup. Variations of it can be found all over the middle eastern world. It's equally easy. Place a quart of plain, non-fat yogurt in the blender. Peel, seed, and insert two cucumbers, as above; they make a kind of picket fence around the blender. Add a large bunch of dill, minus the stems, well washed (it tends to be sandy), 2 cloves of peeled garlic,, 2-3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, 6 splashes of Tabasco Sauce, and 1/4 to 1/2 cup of walnut pieces. Buzz in the blender until the noise (of the walnuts) quiets down. This is thin, tangy and quite sharp. You can make it smoother and less tangy by adding some sour cream or olive oil to the mix. I'd try 1/2 cup of sour cream or 1/4 cup olive oil if you like that idea (not both).

These are our standout favorites. We like them so much that everything else we try -- cold pea, cold chicken curry, vichysoisse, cold fruit soup -- is always a one-time thing, but these are weekly occurences. Each makes four generous servings and is perfectly happy sitting in a container in the refrigerator for several days.

Remembering Julia Child

I mark my culinary education into two periods: before and after Julia Child. Before Julia, I had learned to cook, starting from zero, as an army wife, away from home and family, and with limited means and a very tiny kitchen (I greased my first Thanksgiving turkey to get it into the oven).

After Julia Child, I learned to cook for the love of it -- and for the amazed looks on people's faces when they tasted the results. Watching her on TV made us fearless -- we could try anything. And we did. I remember the Duck a la Orange for Christmas Dinner that took two days to make and 25 minutes to eat; I cried. I remember the Veau Prince Orloff that had more steps than my undergraduate college education. We still talk about the dessert party we had when my husband was in graduate school (it was supposed to be a cheap way of entertaining), with five Julia Child desserts on the buffet, including a Raspberry Charlotte Malakoff on the crystall cake stand at one end and a Chocolate Charlotte Malakoff on the cake stand at the other!

You can tell the recipes that in some sense ceased to be hers and became ours -- the pages of Mastering the Art of French Cooking open, back broken and pages stained, to those places: French Potato Salad, Pommes Gratin Dauphinoise, Zucchini Rapee -- and all the rules for making perfect sauces and souffles.

On her 80th birthday as chefs around the country feted her we invited friends to a special party that featured nothing but Julia's recipes, toasts to Julia, and a donation to one of her culinary interests.

We will celebrate her life soon by doing that again. R.W. Apple in the New York Times says that Julia's favorites are beef and Pommes Anna, and Chocolate, so we shall have all of those. We shall have more -- the pleasure of sharing good food and friendship that she taught so well.

In San Francisco

Visiting San Francisco one more time but scheduling every minute for convention meetings doesn't leave much time for good food experiences.

At the Moscone, anything edible counts as good.

At vendor events, it depends on who the vendor is and whom they're trying to impress. At a VIP party, we made out pretty well, with everything from sushi bruschetta (a new cross-cultural concept, no doubt) to lots of good wine and cheese. Some events were more like hot dogs and beer.

But just before leaving San Francisco for the Red Eye home, I had a wonderful meal with friends at the Hotel Palomar's Fifth Floor restaurant. Here you dine on high-concept, delicious, perfectly executed haute novouelle cuisine. Bring money. And if you're hungry, order extra courses. The portions are very small, but the flavor combinations are delectable and the ingredients impeccable. I tried three appetizers (although main courses aren't much bigger): A pea soup swirled with creme fraiche and topped with seafood ceviche, a diver scallop in a spicy cocoanut curry foam (lots of that), topped by pieces of crunchy rice cake, and a generous piece of sauteed fois gras (you knew that was coming, didn't you), sitting on slices of fresh fig, accompanied by fig jam rolled in slices of raw daikon radish (they looked like tiny cylinders), bits of green heirloom tomato that looked deceptively like the fig, and a fresh plum sauce. Yum! We shared a cheese platter and a trio of cherry desserts (clafouti, a kind of ice cream topped with a foam, and a cherry juice drink) and drank a divine and very pricy California Pinot Noir (Fifth Floor has a marvelous wine list and a very knowledgeable sommelier).

I think I'll come back to San Francisco soon.