My husband, bless him, loves to go to the Grower’s Market.
This was not the kind of thing I expected when I fell in love with him. Mind you, this was the kind of thing I wistfully dreamed about. But not what I thought of in relation to the Dear Husband…dear as he was and is.
But once again, damned if Fate doesn’t have surprises in store for the unwary. Fate and the surprising husband. He went to the market from time to time with me, mainly to hold the bag as it filled up with my various buys. True, he didn’t look bored, but it never occurred to me he might want to take my place.
I blame the turnip omelet. Turnip omelets can only be made successfully (and what a success!) with early spring turnips, those little white ones with the perky pale green tops. Alex loves the turnip omelets I make, particularly when I make them with fresh marjoram.
So there was this month where I was just too busy to go to the Grower’s Market. There must have been a husbandly longing for said turnip omelet. Because by Goddess, if he didn’t offer to go. Offer and come back with bags bulging with all manner of vegetable and fruit options. Mainly three—THREE!—bunches of turnips. And two marjoram plants.
After that it became (the way these things do) his job to do the Grower’s Market marketing. He would ask me what I wanted, but neither of us took that list very seriously. For one thing, you can’t predict what there will be at the market. Part of the pleasure. And another part of the pleasure is to let the buyer follow his heart.
It turned out that for me, a large part of the pleasure was seeing where his heart led him.
I had a great deal of fun looking through the bags he brought home, trying to decide what to cook with all the miscellaneous and unexpected bounty.
And it was unexpected and miscellaneous.
There was the time he brought two huge bunches of parsley (tabbouleh salad). The time he brought three bunches of carrots even though we had five pounds of them in the fridge (carrots baked in cream, leftovers into soup, carrot tops chopped and added to dog stodge). Five pounds of onions (goat cheese and onion puff pastry tart). Six enormous yellow squash (squash frittata, ratatouille). Five mashed peaches (“I thought I put them on the top of the bag,” —quick jam to fill another puff pastry tart).
This week: a pound bag of jalapenos (chile relish); another bag filled with chile peppers (rajas to be eaten with tortillas), and an enormous bag of the most enormous red bell peppers I have ever ever seen.
There must have been at least ten of them. Each and every one the size of a baby’s head.
Now here was a challenge.
What on earth was I going to do with ten red bell peppers?
The obvious starting point is to char them and peel, storing them in their own juice mixed with a little olive oil, some sliced garlic and a couple of red pepper pods. Do you ever do this? It’s the best way to store peppers of any kind; generally I do this with green bell peppers.
A bit messy, but worth it in the long run. You can just stick them all on a foil lined cookie sheet and put in a hot 450 degree oven, turning them as they blacken, or do the same but under the broiler. OR you can do what I did, which is turn the stove top grating over on the burners so they can cradle the peppers, turn on the burners and, using tongs, carefully turn the peppers till their skin is blackened.
Then toss them into a deep bowl (this can be a paper bag, but trust me, ten peppers is too much for any known paper bag), cover with a plate, and let them steam their skins loose.
When they’re cool enough to handle, push the skin off. (Don’t worry if you leave some black bits behind; they’re actually kind of aesthetic, and they add taste.) Do what Mexican cooks picturesquely call ‘castrating the chile’, which is just the way it sounds: pull the top off and deseed. As you do all this, try to collect the juice in a clean bowl, the one where you plan to store your peppers.
By the time you’ve finished with all your peppers, if you had ten like mine, you’ll probably have a lot of juice. But if you’re going to keep them (and if you’ve just made ten roasted peppers and there are only two of you in the household, this is probably what you are going to do), you want to add some olive oil, probably about a quarter cup. Sliced garlic cloves are nice. Red pepper pods too. Cover and refrigerate.
Now: you have your roasted peppers. What do you do with them?
Ah, roasted red peppers. The luxury of roasted red peppers. Let me count the ways:
–a roasted pepper sandwich is particularly nice lined with some thin sliced white onion atop a garlic mayonnaise, with a few leaves of arugula thrown in
–a roasted pepper pizza is tasty, particularly when the crust has been spread with pesto sauce and the peppers are topped with some grated jack cheese
–a ratatouille made with onions and tomatoes and zucchini is delicious with squares of roasted red pepper thrown in.
–a salad of roasted pepper strips mixed with capers, whole anchovies, and chopped Kalamata olives, tossed with a squeeze of lemon juice, is really superior
But best of all is probably Roasted Red Pepper Puree, which goes on such a variety of things I can hardly stop thinking about it: on top of humuus. On top of crackers. On top of slabs of feta. Mixed in a soup.
Here’s the nice way we had it, though. I had some pesto leftover from an exuberant basil harvest. And I was tired coming home from a day of errand running. So I cooked up some linguine, tossed it with the pesto, topped it with chilled red pepper puree, topped that generously with grated Parmesan, and served it forth.
To hear the husband, it was as if I’d spent all day in the kitchen just to make him something resembling food of the gods for his supper.
I effusively thanked him for the effusive thanks. Then reminded him from whence the red peppers had sprung. Which made him quietly pleased, which, along with being well fed, is not a bad state to have a husband in, any day of the week.