I’m truly cooking for one for a couple of weeks while Carol is visiting her parents in Ohio. Last night, part of my dinner was two big ears of corn, grilled. I ate a little less than one, and cut the balance off the ears. When I started thinking about lunch today, I started thinking about corn.

Who doesn’t love corn stir fried with onions, tomato and peppers? Well, I do. But I had no peppers. Oh… I have a bag of Pimiento de Padron peppers from my Mariquita Mystery Box. I was lucky to receive The Ladybug Letter about Pimiento de Padron, just as I was writing this.

“Padron is a town in Spain north of Portugal in Galicia on the Atlantic coast. The citizens of Padron would have been among the first Europeans to see and experiment with these new “peppers” that the explorers brought back from overseas. They adopted one particular variety out of all these newly arrived peppers to be their own “Pimiento de Padron.”

“Gallegan cooks learned that the tiny, tender peppers are very flavorful, and rarely have much heat at all to them if they’re picked young enough. Only the older, firmer, heavier, waxier peppers are hot, and they learned to pick them out and set them aside. The cooks learned too that these new peppers could be cooked fast, in just a little more time than it takes to heat up a cast iron skillet. They’d get the pan hot, splash a little olive oil onto it, and when the oil was almost smoking hot, they’d toss on a handful of the tiny peppers. The peppers would hop and sizzle for a few seconds. When the peppers were blistered on one side, the cooks would shake the pan, toss the peppers, and let them blister on the other side. Then a quick sprinkle of sea salt, a deft sweep of the pan with a wooden fork, and the peppers were served, ready to eat, sweet, savory, salty, and piping hot.” [excerpted from The Ladybug Letter, linked above]

That’s how I have enjoyed my Pimiento de Padron. But today I had something different in mind. Use the little, bright green morsels like one would a bell pepper. How bad can it be? Better yet, How good can it be? With Carol gone, I’m totally free to experiment and develop new ways with known ingredients. Continue reading →

Many vegetables at the Farmers Market — even many supermarkets — come with greens attached. We haven’t discovered a good use for carrot tops; throw those in the compost, or better yet, have your vegetable guy top them for you, then you don’t have to carry them home. But turnip and beet greens are often beautiful, oh so edible and easy to prepare. The thing is, they don’t keep very long; so what to do?

Here’s what I do.

First, the turnips and turnip greens…

Cut and wash the greens, cut up a couple of turnips. These are the little Tokyo turnips, you don’t even have to peel them.

Heat some olive oil over medium heat in a saute pan, add the turnips and greens… add a splash of water and cover. After a couple of minutes, give the greens a stir and season with salt and pepper. Cover and continue cooking for about 5 minutes total.

Uncover, splash with your choice of vinegar. Serve. That’s lunch — or at least the first course.

Now, for the beet greens. This will sound a lot like the turnips.

Thoroughly wash the greens. Put; them in a big bowl of water, swoosh them around, take the greens out one by one, leaving any dirt behind. Put them in a strainer and rinse again with cold water.

Dice the stems and roughly chop the greens.

Heat some olive oil over medium heat in a saute pan, add the stems and cook for about a minute. Add the greens.. add a splash of water and cover. After a couple of minutes, give the greens a stir and season with salt and pepper. Cover and continue cooking for about 5 minutes total.

Uncover, splash with your choice of vinegar and taste to see if they’re tender.

Now, you can eat them if you’re hungry, or put them in a jar to store in the refrigerator until you need a side dish.

“3 red, or colored peppers, roasted, seeded and peeled”

That’s often all the recipe says about the peppers. Everyone has their own roasting method and I’ve tried them all. Recently, the Mariquita Mystery Box was chock full of colored peppers, and not only that, Carol wanted an extra bag of Red Piquillo Roasting Peppers to make her famous pimento cheese spread.

a mother lode of peppers

Roasting peppers takes time. My go-to method is to hold a pepper over a gas flame until blackened, put it in a paper bag to ‘steam’ and then scrape off the skin with the back of a knife. Easy, effective, messy, takes time. Since I had 15 assorted peppers (Hungarian Spicy Peppers and other red and yellow) plus an equal number of the Piquillo to deal with, I thought I’d check out another method, so I went on line to Cook’s Illustrated and searched for roasted peppers. Here’s what CI had to say:

‘After flaming, broiling, and baking dozens of bell peppers of every color, both whole and sliced, we find that slicing and oven-broiling the peppers yields superior results.’

STEP BY STEP: Steps to Perfect Roasted Peppers
Pre-heat the broiler for at least 5 minutes.
1. Slice 1/4 inch from the top and bottom of the pepper.
2. Gently remove the stem from the top lobe.
3. Pull core out of the pepper.
4. Slit down one side of the pepper, then lay it flat, skin side down, in one long strip. Use a sharp knife to slide along the inside of the pepper removing all ribs and seeds.

5. Arrange the strips of peppers on a baking sheet, skin-side up. Flatten the strips with the palm of your hand.
6. Adjust oven rack to its top position. If the rack is more than 3 1/2 inches from the heating element, set a jelly-roll pan, bottom up, on the rack under the baking sheet.

7. Roast until the skin of the peppers is charred and puffed up like a balloon but the flesh is still firm. You may steam the peppers at this point or not, as you wish. Start peeling where the skin has charred and bubbled the most. The skin will come off in large strips.

Sorry CI, that’s just WRONG.

The peppers turned out leathery and really really hard to peel, and why not, cut open, spending time in the broiler dries them out. I don’t know what equipment CI used, but I used a countertop convection oven, which is relatively new, reliable and holds its temperature very well.

C’mon CI: You’re usually reliable, but sometimes you over analyze. Continue reading →

Why on earth would a person want to make his own ketchup?My wife saw Jamie Oliver make ketchup on his TV show and told me about it. I had no intention of actually making ketchup, but I downloaded the recipe from the Food Network website, just in case.

[Yes, I know, I’ve just done two other posts involving Jamie Oliver. It’s just that he’s doing tomatoes right now and they’re in high season. Besides, his cooking is simple and good.]

Continue reading →

Corn, Peppers and BratsWith all of the pleasurable traveling I’ve been doing, there hasn’t been much time to write about cooking real food. It was great to get back to the Saturday Farmers Market.The summer Farmers Market brings lots of good things, corn and bell peppers among them. An onion, a grill and some good mixed brats, some butter and a skillet all came together to make a flavorful, quick, hearty and lip-smackin’ good dinner.Here’s the corn and bell peppers ready to go. No prep needed, except cleaning up the corn.The hot grill is going — opened for the picture. Besides the corn and peppers I had half of a sweet onion and 1/3 of a red onion left from other things, as well as three Johnsonville Beef Brats and two Stadium Brats. In about 4 or 5 minutes, the Brats were browned; the vegetables went for about 8 minutes.I could do the grilling about five o’clock when it was really nice outside and let the food wait until dinnertime. The peppers are sweating in the paper bag.When dinnertime came around, the corn and peppers were sautéed in butter and the Brats put in a 200 ° toaster oven to warm. Cherry tomatoes and a bottle of Cline California Zinfandel completed the picture. Yum.