Hot Summer Cold Soup

If you are a soup person like me, you love the mid-winter coziness of creamy butternut squash soup or thick and hearty chili. And even in the summer (when there is sufficient high-power office building AC), I crave a warm bowl of corn & crab chowder (just had that today for lunch, so good!). But in the peak of summer heat when you face day after day of melting in your sunbaked car and you don't want to even blow dry your hair much less use your oven, a big bowl of chilled soup sounds pretty appealing. So does a salt-rimmed margarita on the rocks, but I digress....

So over the past few summers, I have tried several different varieties of gazpacho, a cold tomato-based soup (usually raw) created by the culinary geniuses in Spain. I've tried various interpretations and levels of chunkiness, and in my attempts I've found a lot of gazpacho recipes that I like, and a few that made me feel like I was eating cold baby food. But I've finally settled on my favorite gazpacho, one that has wandered a bit from it's Spanish roots but is simple, healthy and packed with bold flavors. Most importantly, it requires no cooking whatsoever, so its the perfect dinner after a day of losing layers of skin to a hot leather drivers seat.

Weirdest things I've ever eaten

My standard for weird food may not be the same as most people... I have friends that think eating tofu is just about the craziest thing they can think of to try. So I thought I would put together my list of the top five weirdest things I've eaten and see how I measure up.

1. Grasshopper (in tacos at a mexican restaurant in DC)
2. Beef marrow (Roast, Detroit, MI)
3. Snails (Valencia, Spain)
4. Sea urchin (Restaurant Eve, Alexandria, VA)
5. Shark (first time in Merida, Mexico next to two bottles of tequila, second time grilled at home!)

The grasshopper was the only one I didnt particularly like... the flavor was good, but you could feel their little legs and feet in your mouth, it just didn't pair well with my margarita. In case you hadn't guessed, the common thread of my list is that alcohol was involved in the consumption of all of these items.

What about you - what's on your list??