preview pinks

I have been working for a while now on a special quilt made of fabrics designed by Jessie Aller and made into a packet of fat quarters with one of her lovely color schemes. It is a few shades of pink and gray with a touch of black and white thrown in. I have been having so much fun working with this color way that I wouldn't have chosen myself. I am nearly done making the whole quilt but I want to save it for a final reveal in the very near future. The colors of the quilt and the darker pink I am using for the binding brought to mind another pretty color experience we have been enjoying during the HEAT wave.

hand quilting on the Jasmine Tea quilt is contrasting in rosy pink

Meanwhile I noticed that some of the colors are so much like the most delicious summer treat my partner Keith made us a few days ago Ukrainian summer Borscht. We went to the farmers market last week and I saw a  big box of fresh beets and thought to ask the farmer girl how she made them to eat. She told me to just boil them in water and peel them to slice on salad or to grill them in tin foil and put a little olive oil on them when serving them hot. Both sounded good. We tried a boiled sliced beet on salad the next evening and I can't say I was very excited about how that tasted. The weather has been really hot and we had three more beets boiled and peeled and a pot of beet red liquid in ready to go in the refrigerator. It reminded me of the old days in NYC's East Village when I was poor and ate in bargain priced Ukrainian restaurants often. They served cold borscht soup with a big dollop of sour cream and a sprig of fresh dill on hot summer nights that was so good I could have eaten it over and over again.  After that vision of my earlier delight is when I suggested to Keith he look for a recipe for cold borscht soup and ever since we have been eating the best cold summer soup. pictured here in a small cup all dressed up like the Ukrainians served it at Veselka on second Ave. Leshkos and Odessa on Avenue A. and a other fine ethnic diners in Alphabet city some of them now long gone.

Even Keith who says he hates beets was very excited to eat this cold summer soup. In doing research for this article I found a transcribed Allen Ginsberg recipe for a vegetarian cold summer borscht. He lived in Alphabet city back in the 1980's just like me and maybe next time I will try his version with a salad thrown in! So many ways to enjoy those purple red beets besides pickled. How do you like them cooked, I am curious what you do with your beets if you eat them. Leave me a comment to tell me about your favorite beet recipe or story.

orange, best served chilled in August

gazpacho chilled in a ceramic tureen

heirloom yellow and red tomatoes

One of my favorite soups in the summer is home made gazpacho. A cold tomato soup, that I had first in East Hampton, NY in 1975. I was a driver for a Broadway producer named Myron Sanft; 40 years my senior and very gay with his big round tortoise rimmed glasses. I was hired to drive Mr. Sanft, to the Hamptons while his partner was doing summer stock theater in New Hampshire. Myron didn't like driving and living alone so I was his driver and companion all that summer. When we were in East Hampton we went to beach in the mornings then shopping for fresh foods in town arriving home before the heat of the day arrived. His cozy single story, three bedroom bungalow was on the bay side of long island tucked in the shady bay side woods, it was always very comfortable during the heat of the day. I spent afternoons swinging in his huge rope hammock reading and writing letters or walking down by the bay. Guests came almost every week from the hot noisy city to enjoy Myron's beach house and I was there to help entertain them as well as help out with some of the chores of entertaining. I learned some new ways to prepare food that summer. Myron had very distinct tastes and ideas about fresh food ingredients hence he insisted on daily shopping trips. I learned to stuff and grill whole fresh caught fish, something I had never eaten before. My first experience with gazpacho came when some of Myron's friends who lived in Spain came to visit for a whole week. I have forgotten their names but the husband stayed home alone one day to make us this special meal while we swam and sunned on the beach. He told me it was a cold tomato soup, I thought to myself," oh boy, that doesn't sound like much of a meal with no meats" but I politely keep my thoughts to myself. Later when we returned from our full day on the beach I became a total gazpacho devotee. His mysterious cold soup was GREAT and I at 19 asked endless questions about the process he used to prepare this meal I thought was so very delicious. Now looking back it seems to me most of the preparation was carefully cutting all the various garnishing ingredients and chilling the strained tomato juice and pulp (seeds and skins mysteriously vanished). He gave us bowls and let us add our own garnish to suit our preferences, as he said they do in Spain, of green peppers, cucumbers, toasted croutons, green onions and freshly ground black pepper.

Recently, I came across four very different gazpacho recipes in Martha Stewart Living magazine and decided that I wanted to try the yellow/orange gazpacho with boiled egg and crouton garnish instead of the recommended Serrano ham. On my birthday last week I used a few pounds of yellow heirloom tomatoes and a single red tomato and grated them down with seedless cucumber and a clove of fresh garlic, red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, salt and fresh ground black pepper into the lovely home made gazpacho. Keith had a dozen organic farm eggs with orange yokes I boiled to garnish the soup for my birthday dinner. He made us a great delicacy of bison marinated charcoal grilled flank steak and provided my favorite frangipane pear/almond tart for my fifty fourth birthday.

I made this yellow-orange gazpacho again this week to take back out to share with Mom because I took her Living magazine for the recipe and we decided it tastes a little better when a little less chilled if you are inside with air conditioning rather than on a steamy East Hampton veranda. These pictures are in our tiny kitchen posed with a couple of spare tomatoes in my favorite hand made ceramic soup tureen before I set it aside to chill.

All these years later, when nearly everyone has heard of and tasted some sort of gazpacho, I know that it is a great treat when made authentically with the freshest local ingredients thanks to my first experience with Myron Sanft's house guest who spent an entire day preparing my original gazpacho dinner. I also found out back then he had time while the soup's ingredients chilled to read the NY Times cover to cover in the shade on that relaxing in the tied rope hammock so it couldn't have been too difficult.