Lucques' Yellow Tomato Gazpacho

It's been hot and breezeless here in los angeles, and since I'm not into air conditioning, it's been a pretty sweaty week as well. I was coping OK until I made a frozen pizza for lunch and thought I was going to melt off the face of the erf. It didn't show signs of cooling down anytime soon, and I began dreading my next attempt.

"What am I going to maaaaaake? I don't waaaant to coooook anything."
To which Matt would say, "Can I turn on the air conditioning?"

So I was ecstatic to discover this no-cook / heatwave-approved attempt in Suzanne Goin's, Sunday Suppers at Lucques. If you live in los angeles, no doubt you've heard of Lucques, AOC or Tavern. But all you really need to know is that this cookbook is swarming with painstakingly difficult recipes, except this one that Goin calls "foolproof." Yeah, Suzanne? I'll see about that.

Sunday Suppers' version:

our version:

(Yeah. Ours is a little chunkier, but we'll get to that later.)

This recipe is all about the produce. Starting with some amazing yellow heirloom tomatoes.

A jalapeño and orange pepper.

Next we had to blanch the tomatoes, which means you try to make the tomatoes look like Blanche from The Golden Girls. We achieved this by dropping them in boiling water for thirty seconds (making them nice and hot) and then into an ice bath to cool off from all that promiscuity.

Here they are demoralized.

After chopping the supporting veggies, we threw everything in a bowl in preparation for blending.

And that's where the foolproof recipe turned on us--the blender was leaking. And when actually blending, the minimal leak turned into a flowing river of yellow gazpacho, so once things looked just crushed and mixed together, we stopped blending.
(This picture isn't worth a thousand words. It became a much bigger mess, I swear.)

The recipe called for straining, but because we had to pull it early, when we tried passing it through the strainer, we basically had no soup left. So we put everything in the bowl and embraced its chunkiness.

Personally, I think I would prefer it chunky, of course I haven't tried the Lucques-perfect strained version, but despite the blender malfunction, the end product was totally delicious, and after chilling it for an hour, it was incredibly refreshing. So maybe it is foolproof?

Oh, there I am, after eating a big bowl of soup. Ooops, cat's out of the bag. Gatsby here. Really is foolproof. byyyeeeeeee!