I don’t know what it is about Ramadan, but fasting makes me think about food. My last entry was about bread. What goes well with bread? Soups, of course! Toast up a little bread and dip it in hot soup, like little croutons. Mm mmm. Some soups even begin with stale leftover bread. Like this Gazpacho Andaluz. [[image:soup10.jpg:Gazpacho Andaluz:center:0]] I’ve had Gazpacho before, but usually it’s chopped tomatoes and other veggies in it (sort of like a mediterranean bubur ca ca without the bubur). But when we were in Jaen, at Alfonso’s El Bar Dalas, I had my first taste of the Andalucian Gazpacho. It’s a smoothly pureed raw vegetable soup, and if served as a tapa, it was served in a chilled wineglass. It was smooth going down and even though I hate tomatoes, I loved this gazpacho. I wasted no time in finding a recipe for it when […]

I thought and thought and thought about my new hobby – bread baking, and I wanted to write a long paean to it. But now the days keep passing me by and my workload has not lessened. The summer is zooming by and I’m sure Hisham thinks I’ve totally forgotten that he’d done all this work to get my pictures formatted for the blog. Well, rather than research bread and write a history of bread, this will mostly be a photojournal of my new obsession. For my birthday this year, Vin bought me a KitchenAid artisan 6 quart stand mixer: [[image:bread01.jpg:Toy! My Toy!:center:0]] It was exactly what I wanted, given that I’d been dropping hints and marking my Kitchen.com catalogs for months before my birthday. Vin finally just sat down, pointed it out and discussed with me what size, what features, what color, etc. I wanted. So I got exactly […]