Gazpacho

I have had a tremendous craving for gazpacho lately, which I suppose is derived from the extremely hot weather of the past few weeks and the subsequent disinterest in all hot foods. But then again on of the hottest days we had Korean barbeque (which entailed sitting next to a sweltering butane grill and searing my own bulgogi), and the other day we had great big bowls of steaming hot pho, so maybe that makes me a big liar. However, that's because I also have a really crappy cold with a lung-rattling cough, so I've been trying to punish the virus into submission with additional heat. I think it's working..?
But back to gazpacho. Man, that stuff is good. I finally realized my goal yesterday... peel, seed and chop tomatoes; microplane garlic; dice red pepper and cucumber; mince a bit of onion; mix it all up with some salt, a bit of sugar, red wine vinegar and a bit of balsamic to vaguely compensate for the very regrettable fact I have no nice sherry vinegar-- well, any sherry vinegar, period. I didn't add bread because I personally don't really roll like that, not for gazpacho. And we're out of olive oil, but it would be so much better with it, so I think I'll have to to get some. And there you have it. It's awful good, but I could definitely also go for some Gazpacho Fitzgerald (I know, only a couple of you get that reference).
We also tried to go to a new (to us) market, but upon arrival at 1:00 sharp it was almost entirely broken down, which is quite unusual, especially as it was a fairly decent-sized one. Managed to quick snatch up some gazpacho fixins and haggle 3 melons for 5 euros-- heh heh heh. It's too bad it was done with, especially as I had heard one woman sells the normally quite rare fresh (which is to say unaged) camembert, which is twice the height of the normal stuff and eaten like many other fresh cheeses: either sweetened with sugar or honey, or savory with chopped herbs and cracked pepper.

In other news, we saw Life Aquatic last night at La Villette, which I liked much, much more than the first time I saw it. Unfortunately they started the movie too late, or maybe the problem was that they showed a short film first, so afterwards we missed the last metro-- along with probably several hundred -or more- other people. We took a meandering trek through the upper 19eme to Belleville, where we finally caught the Noctilien. All in all, it took us about two hours to get back.

Tonight we have an appointment to go check out this pretty cool-sounding place to live by Montparnasse. We're keeping our fingers crossed!