Slightly muddy gazpacho

I was very thrilled that Week 1 of the Pants Off Cook Off was cold soup, because gazpacho is one of the 5 food categories I have ever made successfully. I picked this recipe because, you know, high ratings on Epicurious, and also it uses canned tomatoes, which makes it easy.

The recipe basically calls for pureeing half the stuff in a blender while reserving the other half, chopped up, for chunkiness. This is a good idea, I think, because my previous attempts at gazpacho have tended to veer too far in one direction or the other: all homogeneous like baby food, or too chunky, like salsa.

It's also a good idea because the first, pureed half of the gazpacho looked a lot like poop. The poopy color is probably an unavoidable result when you puree green and red stuff together. I probably worsened the problem by substituting green peppers for the celery in the recipe (I don't like celery, with the stringy things and all). Next time I'd try red pepper instead. Also, I had bought about half of the tomatoes fresh instead of canned, so as to class up the operation, and instead of pureeing all the tomato I just chopped some--but I think the canned ones have more juice, which would probably also help make the pureed part more red.

After I added the chopped stuff, though, the results improved dramatically. I let it sit in the fridge overnight, as per the instructions, and had it for dinner the next day. My verdict: quite good, although not the very pinnacle of gazpachoness. In addition to the aforementioned color issue, it could stand to be spicier. Altogether, though, I feel it was a pretty successful venture into the kitchen.