Fall Tomatoes

I didn't plant any tomatoes this year, since the past few years I've tried but had little success.  Amazingly, I had two volunteer tomato plants come up in random parts of my garden, and they made more tomatoes than any of my past attempts!  The tomatoes took their time to ripen, and are now finally ready to eat... now that it's October.

So now that I have a bunch of tomatoes, I tried making gazpacho!  I've had a craving for it lately, and the store bought stuff just doesn't do it for me.  So here's the (delicious) version I made up last night :)

Liz's Awesome Gazpacho

• 1 English cucumber
• 1/2 yellow pepper
• 1/4 onion
• 4 or 5 medium tomatoes
• 1 medium clove garlic
• Juice of 1 lime
• ~1/4 cup parsley
• ~2 cups mint leaves
• ~ 1/4 cup olive oil
• Salt & pepper
• 1 cup of warm (softened) cooked white rice

Roughly chop everything and add to a food processor or blender.  I used a giant food processor, you could work in batches in a smaller blender or food processor and combine pured veggies in a big mixing bowl.  Add salt and pepper to taste, I probably used around 1 tsp of salt, but if you want flavor with less salt I bet you could substitute some lime zest.

Serve cold, and enjoy!

Crock Pot Adventure!

Tis the season!  Here's what's in the pot:

1 onion, chopped
2 carrots
half a red pepper
half a green pepper
4 or 5 chopped garlic cloves (did you know in spanish, they call them teeth?)
beef stew meat
1 sweet potato, chopped
3? small red potatoes, chopped
half a zuchinni, chopped
Red cooking wine (1/4 cup?)
Beef broth (1 or 2 cups?)

I added them in the order listed above, but saved half the garlic to put directly on top of the meat.  For some reason, I took the effort to brown the entire frozen slab of stew meat (it's chunks, but they were so frozen solid that they never broke apart), and then deglazed the pan with a tiny bit of red cooking wine and beef broth, and poured that into the crock over the beef.

Who knows what it will taste like, but it sure was colorful!  And gluten free!  And my 6 quart crock was quite full.

UPDATE:  It was really good!  The sweet potatoes and meat all fell apart when stirred, and made a nice thick, sweet stew.  I sprinkled a little bit of "pasta sprinkle" and black pepper on before serving.  It was ugly though, so no photo.