El Macho Gazpacho

I've been on vacation. Not a staycation, not an oblication, but a real live vacation. Because I am a natural-born overachiever and kindly philanthropist, I volunteered my excess brainpower during my time away from work to thinking Grand Thoughts that could change the very course of humanity. Unfortunately, lazy slug that it is, my brain summarily rejected my proposal and instead seems to have gone on vacation itself - with no clear date of return indicated.

So the thoughts I thought while on vacation were not *quite* so grand as one might have hoped. (Nor were the thoughts I thought today back at work - brain? Braaaain?? Please come home now. Mommy's scared.) I thought things like, 'hot enough for ya?'; 'dang, got sand in my crack'; and 'yayyyyyy! ice tweam!' Heck, I even said those things - that's how on vacation I was.

Y'know what else is a fun thing to say on vacation? Gazpacho. Ordinarily, gazpacho sounds disgusting to me. But since my brain wasn't around to think smart thoughts like "Cold soup? Yuck" on my behalf, I ended up ordering gazpacho at a restaurant one day, purely because it was fun to say. The waitress came near me and gazpacho just slipped from my unmanned head straight out of my mouth. Just like that: gazpacho. Whee!

And y'know what? It turns out that gazpacho is more than just cold soup with a fun name - it's also really tasty. In fact, it's not much like cold soup at all. It's more like... salad. Blended salad. Delicious! I'm not even shitting you. You should try it sometime.

Having said that, it seems to me that not all salads would be equally well-suited to blending into a gazpacho. I think the trick would be to ensure you didn't include things like meat or cheese or hard-boiled eggs in your salad before you blended it.

You might think this would be obvious to most people, but I actually know a guy who made himself a blended chef's salad; he said the little slippery chunks of ham just about made him puke. Totally not his fault, though: his brain heard he was getting his wisdom teeth pulled and said, "Nuts to this place, I'm going on vacation. See you in a month." Next thing the guy knew... gazpacho.

Happens to the best of us, Jerry. Happens to the best of us.