Recipes for a heatwave

Ingredients for Salmorejo

The last thing anyone wants to do right now is cook.

I'm living on slices of melon, olives, crisps and a serious amount of gin and tonic. Other no-cook options include salads, ceviche (fish 'cooked' by lime), and bright raw vegetables. But your best friend in the kitchen during a heatwave is your blender.

The blender will conjure up dips, fruit drinks and chilled soups - no need to approach the stove. A cold vegetable soup might not sound appetising but Spanish flavours are just what you need in this heat. I can glug gazpacho by the jug during hot weather. Plus it's an effortless way of achieving your five-a-day.

From Madrid comes Salmorejo, very similar to gazpacho, but using bread. It's a light pink colour and served in a bowl, whereas the darker-hued gazpacho tends to be served in a glass.

In my recipe I added a few drops of 'liquid smoke' for a hint of BBQ. Ideally you'd use cold smoked tomatoes, which, using gadgets like Heston's gun smoker, aren't difficult to make.

Finally, you can also do as the Greeks do: cook in the evening and save it for the next day's lunch. This recipe for Mexican black bean soup, which works just as well in summer as in winter, rather like a cup of tea cools you down when it's hot. Make it the night before and heat it up the next day.

Salmorejo Soup recipe

To turn this into Gazpacho, add skinned green and red peppers (roasted if you wish), cucumber, and either remove the bread or use one slice.

Serves 4

8 large very ripe tomatoes, chopped roughly
3/4 slices of stale baguette
2 cloves garlic
1tsp sweet smoked paprika
750ml approximately of freshly boiled water
200ml extra virgin olive oil
1tbsp Sherry vinegar
1tbsp sea salt
A few drops of liquid smoke (optional)

Garnish:
Fresh basil leaves

Put the tomatoes, bread, garlic and paprika into a large heat proof bowl. Cover with hot water and leave to soak.
Place into a blender along with the other ingredients and blend.
Leave to chill in the fridge and serve cold with fresh basil and a glass of fino sherry.

Crudités with Green Goddess dip

Here your job is to cut up the vegetables in an attractive way, and get the blender out again for the dip. The joy is in the crunch of the sweet raw vegetables and the soft savouriness of the dip. Choose a variety of rainbow colours: radishes, carrots, peppers, also baby sweetcorn, mange tout, celery sticks. I like to leave some of the leaves on the radishes and carrots for a fresh garden look.

Green Goddess dip

Use whatever green soft herbs you have.

One large ripe avocado

A small bunch of fresh chives

A bunch of fresh basil leaves

A small bunch of tarragon (optional)

A small bunch of dill (optional)

A small bunch of parsley(optional)

50ml natural thick yoghurt or kefir

Juice of 1 lemon

1 clove of garlic

1tsp sea salt (or more to taste)

50ml olive oil

Put all the ingredients into a blender except for the olive oil. Once blended, add the olive oil gradually while the blender is running. 

Mexican Black Bean Soup recipe

This recipe does require stove time - best to make in the evening and reheat the next day. The mild spiciness will cool you down.

Serves 6

250g black turtle beans
1 poblano pepper
2 -3 avocado leaves
Mexican epazote
1tbsp sea salt
Olive oil
2 brown onions, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
250g tomatoes, chopped
3 tbsp coarse cornmeal
2L vegetable stock


Garnish:
1/2 cucumber, diced
1 avocado, diced
A small handful of fresh coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime,
Avocado oil


Soak the beans overnight. Cover with water, adding the poblano, avocado leaves and epazote, and cook on a low heat for an hour or two until the beans are soft but not crumbling.
After the first hour, add salt.
Meanwhile in a deep frying pan, soften the onions in the olive oil until pale gold.
Add the garlic, tomatoes and simmer for ten minutes.
Scoop out half the bean mixture and whizz up in a blender and return to the stockpot.
Transfer the fried onions and tomatoes to the stock pot with the beans.
Add the cornmeal and the vegetable stock. Cook for half an hour or more.

Serve topped with the garnish.

Accompany with corn tortillas.

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Summer recipe: tropical fruit with Tajin and lime in a watermelon bowl

 We have a rare patch of hot weather here in the UK, it feels like another country. Let's take a tip from hotter climates on how to eat. No cook recipes are what you want, begone slaving over a hot stove.
The Mexicans have it right, with their light and refreshing beach snacks. Every day on the beach at Sayulita, near Puerta Vallarte, a series of vendors would stomp up and down the hot sands, big pot on their heads, cool box banging against their knees, calling out what they were selling, a repetitive loop that merged into a song. 

What was particularly brilliant, if you were staying a few days, is that you could put in orders. Like, meet me here on this patch of sand tomorrow at 5pm with a vegetarian tamale, no make that two, type thing. And if you weren't on that patch of sand, they'd find you, wherever you were. Because they all chat to each other, the vendors, and they say, oh no, that gringa with the red hair is a bit further up.

My fruit guy would bring me a large plastic beer glass studded with spears of pineapple, mango and watermelon. Over the fruit, he'd squeeze of bottle of chilli sauce, add lime and salt. Try it, it's both savoury and sweet, cooling and heating.

In Mexico they sell Tajin, ready-made small packs of a chilli lime and salt mixture, for school lunch boxes and picnics!
If you haven't got a chilli sauce you like you could also grind up a dried chilli with some salt and sprinkle that.

In India they use sulphuric black salt and lime over fruit which is also very good. The salt, obtainable in most Indian shops as Kala Nemak, smells a bit farty but tastes wonderful and gives that authentic Indian sour taste.

This is also a great recipe to add to a barbeque spread.

Tropical fruit with chilli and lime in a watermelon bowl recipe

For two

1 small watermelon
1 papaya
1 mango
1 lime
Your favourite chilli sauce
or grind together some dried chillis
Salt

You could also add a small pineapple. If you want to make this dish for more people, buy a large watermelon. Make sure the fruit is ripe then chill in the fridge. Cold fruit is even more refreshing.

Cut the watermelon in half then on one half, cut a thin slice from the bottom so that it will stand up like a bowl. Carefully, with a knife, cut around the inside edge, and then, without cutting through the skin, cut each half into pie type slices. Use a spoon to pull out the wedges and set them aside.
Cut the papaya in half, scoop out the black seeds, then like an avocado, use a thin knife to cut inside the  skin, then cut slices lengthways. Peel off the skin.

Mangos are always a bugger to cut because of the stone in the middle. Here is a great link which will explain perfectly how to do it. Rather than cutting the hedgehog pattern at the end however (although that's great for salsa or a fruit salad), I cut the mango into spears, lengthwise.
Put all your fruit into the watermelon bowl.

Squeeze the lime juice onto the fruit, scatter some good sea salt on it, then add the chilli sauce.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad