'Tis the season...

...for figs!

One of my favorite things about Israel (of course it would be food-related) is the abundance of fresh produce here. There are only a handful of fruits and veggies that the States does better - apples and corn, to name two.

Our landlord has tons of fruit trees around the yard. Unfortunately, this year's weather prevented the berry and cherry trees from producing much of anything. My disappointment at not being able to pluck fresh cherries from the backyard was compounded by the fact that the same weather affected all the country's orchards, thus driving up fruit prices at the market. It's hard to spend 12 shekels/kilo on peaches when last year they were half that.

But the figs! The figs survived! The figs are coming! Ron collected all those you see in the photo (minus the half-dozen we promptly devoured for breakfast). And they are so. Good. And I think this would explain the appearance of two fruit bats to our yard last night - last year we would sit outside after the sun went down and watch them fly around the yard, confused by Ron's squeaking bat-calls. Last night was the first night we saw any! All because of the figs!

I almost died today. Or felt like it. In my head, parking a few km down the mountain to start my usual Saturday 20-24km run would mean my run would be flat.

The run was beautiful, looping around trails in the mountains outside Jerusalem, near Givat Yearim and Kesalon:

Problem was, it wasn't flat. Not even a little bit.

During all those yellow/orange/red sections - so, like, an hour+ - I was kicking myself for not making gazpacho yesterday. It would have tasted amazing post-run (although, let's face it, my running socks probably would have tasted amazing provided they were chilled first). I had stocked up on extra veggies at the market especially with this recipe in mind. I made it once before, and it's lovely. Granted, my recipe looks a bit different from the published recipe on Epicurious.com, in that I entirely ignore the quantities (do people really measure out vegetable amounts in recipes?!). Like most recipes, I tend to use them as guidelines, rather than hard-and-fast rules. I'm by no means a seasoned chef, but I know my way around the kitchen enough to feel confident tweaking recipes even if I've never followed them before - it's just a matter of knowing which things you can change or substitute (# of garlic cloves) and which things are best left alone (flour:sugar:egg ratios in baking). Of course, if a recipe involves yeast, the only thing I change is adding the instruction "hold your breath and pray."

Well, after a fantastic banana-pear-yogurt-milk-flax-peanut butter smoothie (thankfully I did not have to eat my socks), I set to work making the gazpacho I spent 7 brutal miles drooling over.

First things first:

Because cooking isn't cooking without a glass of wine.
Please note the still-wet bottles from my water belt. I have an amazing transition time in my running-drinking biathlon.


One of my favorite things about living in Israel is the plethora of amazing fresh produce. Cucumbers here have FLAVOR. Plus, you don't have to peel them, because their skins aren't made of wax. And, it's cheap - peppers right now are about 4 shekels/kilo, which works out to about $1/kilo, which works out to 45c/pound. So many conversions, so little time.

Ingredients all assembled, I set to chopping. And chopping. Like I said, I didn't measure anything, I just made sure I had room left in the bowl for the liquid ingredients and that all the colors were in a nice proportion. Final count: 2 peppers (one yellow, one orange), 3 tomatoes, 3 cucs, a handful of cilantro, 2 little red onions, one hot pepper, cumin, pepper, homemade chicken stock, the remainder of the bottle of white wine vinegar, a 3-second pour of olive oil, one liter tomato juice, juice from half a lemon. Plus, the mashed garlic-salt-egg concoction (with 3 cloves and sea salt) and breadcrumbs to thicken.

  Before:                                            

                      
After:

It's now merrily chilling, and unless we eat during the Germany-Argentina game, it will be dinner. Unless Ron gets to it first, I already had to keep his nose out of the bowl once!