Tortilla de Patatas (Spanish Omelette)

Ahh Thanksgiving… an entire day devoted to cooking, eating, and hanging out with friends and family. My sister and I spent a relaxing and mostly lazy Thanksgiving day cooking various things from my ever-growing collection of cookbooks: roast chicken with bread salad a la Zuni Cafe, Heidi’s always-awesome brussels sprouts (you will not want to eat them any other way after you try hers), a simple creamed spinach from Alice Waters, plus freshly baked French bread (courtesy of The Bread Bible), topped with tapenade and white bean-garlic spread. To round out this already giant meal (remember, we only had two people!), my sister made a cranberry-apple crisp. Oh and let’s not forget the big pitcher of sangria to quench our thirst. Cheers to another successful Thanksgiving!

Of course, now that the big dinner’s over and I’m hiding out at home to avoid scary Black Friday madness (have I told you that I find crazed shoppers really, really creepy?), I’m no longer thinking about Thanksgiving recipes. And thanks to some self-restraint on our part, I don’t even have to think much about using up leftovers and my stove can get some well-deserved rest today.

Although… there are a bunch of unused potatoes sitting in the fridge that’s just asking to be used in a Spanish tortilla. Well… I’m sure the stove won’t mind doing a little more work.

 

Gazpacho

With the sudden appearance of sweltering summer days in the city, I’m finding it really hard to motivate myself to turn on the stove. Add to that a huge pile of work plus the adventure of trying to sell my car (long story short: it’s sold. And I even managed to not sell it to this crew of ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ kids who kept offering me $2100 when another guy already told me he’ll pay me $2200), and you’ve got one not-very-active blogger!

But now that the car’s sold and I’m sitting at home drinking echinacea tea while recovering from a cold (oh the irony!) and thus, not feeling too guilty about not doing actual school work, it’s time to share with you a recipe. This one doesn’t even require turning on the stove!

If you’ve been going to farmer’s markets lately, I’m sure you’ve been noticing the mountains of beautiful tomatoes everywhere. As we’re nearing the end of tomato season, Nathan and I have officially begun our annual quest to eat as many tomatoes as possible before they disappear from the markets. Orangette, in an article in Bon Appetit magazine, gave a recipe for oven-roasted tomatoes that I’ve been dying to try. But I’m going to wait until we get some proper San Francisco summer days again (read: foggy, windy, and chilly) before turning on the oven for multiple hours.

In the meantime, an icy cold gazpacho sounds like the perfect way to fulfill our tomato quota. When I did my gazpacho research, some recipes recommended using a food mill instead of a blender because you supposedly lose the bright red color if you use a blender. But if you know me, you know that I hate buying a piece of equipment just for a single purpose, so I decided to ignore all the warnings, pull out our trusty blender, and risk a not-so-red gazpacho. To help rescue the color a bit, I blended only half of the tomatoes and finely chopped the rest.

So what do you think? Is my food-mill-less gazpacho a red-enough gazpacho?