Dear LPG, 

I have had my problems with actually cooking lately so I decided that this was the month to try something where there was no cooking needed at all, or so I thought, but my problems started when I gathered the ingredients together.  There always seems to be some detail that reading a recipe does not prepare you for.

Buying the needed elements is nearly always very easy but it is all about the preparation and the first item on my list was tomatoes.  Of course, I do know what a tomato is but when it came to pealing one, I quickly discovered one of the few things that I did not know about preparing them.  I have never done that before and my first attempt left me with a fruit that was in so battered a state that I ended up doing a lot of chopping and then adding it, plus the skin I could not remove, to a gravy I made later.

I obviously needed an extra lesson and Google taught me to blanch them, and having done that it was all quite easy to get the skins off, but the ‘no cooking’ aspect of the dish was lost.   After that I cut up the rest of the ingredients and put them in my smoothie maker and that was it.

I think that my taste testers were dubious when I first mentioned cold tomato soup and, although I and one of them have heard of it before, discovering and preparing for this challenge left me worrying about the pros of presenting any part of a cold meal during a UK October.  Luckily the dregs of the summer that were still with us on the day that I attempted this dish made it surprisingly flavoursome. 

The anticipation of November drew me to Albania where I discovered that they are fiercely proud of one of their national dishes which is known as Tavë kosi; a lamb based yogurt dish.  I have decided that I have spent perhaps too many of the past months trying to avoid more complicated dishes and my execution was not perfect in spite of my quest for the easy.   So I have decided that November is the month where I should produce something that requires a little more expertise and determination. 

I will give it my best shot and let you know how it goes in due course… 

CB, Lewisham.

Just in case you would like to go Albanian with her next month CB offers the recipe… 

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