Simply put, gazpacho is a refreshing Spanish cold tomato soup. It is NOT, as a restaurant once served me, a regular, cooked tomato soup that you put in the fridge and don’t reheat before serving. It really isn’t. Gazpacho is raw. It’s a no-cook soup. It’s a liquid salad. It’s absolutely delicious.

Since a savoury smoothie is hardly enough to sustain us all evening, we chased this delightfully refreshing soup down with some crêpes.

Ingredients (for 2):

500 g sweet ripe vine tomatoes

1/2 red bell pepper (seed and skin removed)

1/2 a cucumber (peeled and deseeded)

2 slices of bread (soaked in water and crust removed)

1 clove garlic

3 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp white wine vinegar

salt

pepper

• Peel, deseed and chop the vegetables as well as you can. Then blend them as smooth as possible using a stick blender, or chuck them in the food processor.
• Push the soup through a sieve to get rid of all the unwanted bits.
• Add the bread, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and salt and pepper and blend until smooth.