Farmer's Market Bounty: Roasted Red Peppers

This past week has been all about preserving (for days/weeks but not months) the fresh produce from the weekly Farmer's Market. In addition to making oven-dried tomatoes, I wanted to preserve the large, red peppers that I picked up this week. I've been thinking about red peppers, marinated in herbs, oil, and vinegar, and what a wonderful accompaniment they would make to salads and on pita bread with goat cheese. (Now that I've got the cheesemaking bug, I think goat cheese is my next accomplishment.) Anyway, I found this great resource for roasting peppers and keeping them. (While there are a ka-gillion recipes that call for roasted red peppers, if they don't require you to open a jar, then you are expected to use them all up as part of a larger recipe.) I wanted information on how to dress up roasted red peppers that would keep in the fridge to be added to snacks and meals over the course of a few weeks. And I found here, in a New York Times Health piece.

I started by grilling the peppers directly on the burner. I actually woudn't recommend doing two front to back like this, since I would occasionally "warm" my forearm while reaching over the front pepper to check and turn the back pepper. I moved the back pepper to the left front burner and that was a much safer way to roast two at a time. It took about 5 minutes or so to roast each pepper.

Here is a pepper almost completely roasted. Its skin is almost completely blackened.

Then, once I'd charred each pepper as well as I could, I put them each in a bowl and covered tightly with cling wrap. They stay in there, steaming a bit, until they cool. Once they're cooled down, after about ten minutes, I peeled off the blackened skin, which comes off very easily. It breaks apart and sticks to your hands, so I found it helpful to rinse my hands repeatedly. (I remember vaguely reading somewhere that you want to resist just putting the peppers under running water--although that is a super easy way to get the skin off--since it washes away a lot of the roasted flavor. I don't remember where I read or heard this--or maybe I've invented this. Anyway, because of this half-memory of something that might not even be true, I resisted putting them under the faucet, and instead, put my hands under the faucet.

Once they were peeled, I followed the suggestions in the recipe. I a) sliced in half over a bowl (you want to keep all the juice that is caught inside the pepper); b)seeded and cored the pepper; c) sliced the halves into strips and put those in a separate bowl with the strained juices; d) added dried basil (would've used fresh, of course, but had none on hand), sea salt, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, about 3 garlic cloves minced, and 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar; e) I mixed it all up to evenly distribute all the flavors and then put them into jars for the fridge--well, one pickle jar and one plastic take-out container.

After tasting a few this morning, I might add a bit more vinegar and perhaps more dried seasonings. But they're fresh and bright-tasting. The first thing I thought of when biting into one was how good they would taste on a pizza.