The Cost of Making Gazpacho

Yesterday, I made gazpacho from Billfolder lindseykai’s recipe:

This is, more or less, the gazpacho recipe I grew up with.

Like nearly all of the recipes I undertake, I varied it just slightly to accommodate what I already had in my kitchen and what I will never, ever have in my kitchen (I am one of those people who cannot stand the texture of chopped raw onion).

Here’s what it cost me:

2 cups grape tomatoes: $1.40 (roughly 1/5th of a 2 lb, $6.99 package)

1 yellow bell pepper: $1.25

1/2 cucumber: $0.40 (half of a $0.79 cucumber which was as long as my forearm)

4 cloves garlic: $0.40 (a little less than half of a $1 head, and I doubled the garlic for this recipe since I wasn’t using any onion)

1 Knorr vegetable bouillon cube dissolved into 2 cups boiling water and cooled: $0.22 (from a six-cube, $1.29 box)

2 cups V8 original 100% vegetable juice: $0.83 (I added the bouillon water and then poured in V8 until all the chopped vegetables were covered; ended up using roughly 2 cups from the 6 cup, $2.50 bottle)

1 tbsp Signature Kitchens red wine vinegar: $0.06 (from a 12.5 fl oz, $2.29 bottle)

1 teaspoon Signature Select extra virgin olive oil: $0.04 (from a $5.99, 25.4 fl oz bottle)

Total cost of a four-bowl batch of gazpacho: $4.60

Cost per bowl: $1.15

I ate this with 1/5 of a loaf of sourdough bread ($0.44) broiled with one ounce of Tillamook cheddar cheese ($0.34), bringing my total meal cost to $1.93. (Then I ended up crumbling a few crackers into the gazpacho after I had finished dipping my cheesy bread in the bowl, so we can call it an even $2.00.)

The soup tasted amazing. So fresh and garlicky and vegetably! I would eat this every day if I could, although I think at some point I’d need food with just a little more bulk to it. But I’ll definitely make it again very soon, since I still have half a cucumber and two-thirds of a bottle of V8 juice to use up before they go bad.

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