Gazpacho, with a hint of pasta

For this week's cooking extravaganza, we invited my friend Madoka, who is totally adorable and fun, and Robin, also fun, but I'm afraid Madoka win's on adorability. Robin has other fantastic characteristics. I'm sure she can swear in Mexican and drink tequila better than Madoka, but I would like to see the tequila part put to the test.

So, while in the park the other day I read something about sweet potato french fries with honey, cumin and ginger. I wanted to try that out, and since it's spring time we wanted some spring like food, so we made spinach salad with strawberries (except there weren't any and we used papaya instead) and gazpacho. I learned my gazpacho recipe from my friend's mom way back in the day and it used V8 juice instead of stock (which makes the whole process go about 20X faster) but lacking that, I used a tin of spaghetti sauce with italian herbs. The result was good, but had hints of pasta.

                                                                                                                                                                        Madoka got the fun job of wrestling with the sweet potatos to turn them into fry shape, she did admirably. The blender did a fantastic job with the rest. The salad was the winner in my opinion, I'm going to do a lot more spinach/fruit salads in the near future. I liked the papaya as it was not too sweet, and when mixed with some balasamic/mustard dressing because rather delicious. Also it's very colorful and I'm into that. My mom used to make a spinach salad with rice noodles. I must ask her for that recipe sooner rather than later.

Summer in Shanghai being what is, it's very key to have a good stock of cold and easy dishes available.

I'll get on Claire to post some pictures and write more! Anyone who wants recipes, write and tell me! I'll be happy to post but right now I'm pretending to write for work...