Anyone Can Roast a Pepper

Sometimes, cooking is a surprise.

I always believed roasting peppers would be terribly difficult, even though cooking show hosts always say it isn’t.

So, I thought it was high time I get over my fear and just go for it!

With delish August red peppers in hand, I roasted away.

And, I successfully did so without causing the smoke alarm to go off.

Score!

Too bad I was home alone. Normally I DO make the smoke alarm go off during my culinary tasks while my husband Mark is up in the Man Room trying to get work done. Or let’s be real, he’s probably researching fantasy football stats on ESPN.com.

So, there’s a few different ways to roast up a pepper. I followed a combination of tips from Mario Batali and Lidia Bastianich. Love them.


Mario said to oil up your peppers. I used three big red peppers with 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil.


I placed the three peppers on a baking sheet and put them under the broiler on high. Once the top blackens, take out the tray and flip the peppers over to blacken the other side. Be careful when you take the tray out of the oven, because the hot oil jumps all around. I also don’t recommend doing this if you JUST cleaned your oven. You’ll be cursing at yourself.


Anyway, once they’re all roasted up, Lidia says to put them in a bowl and cover the bowl with a piece of plastic wrap for an hour. So, I did that.

Then, when the peppers are all cooled, the skin peels right off. You take the stem and seeds out and slice away. This is a slimy process, be warned.

I made Mario’s Marinated Roasted Peppers with Goat Cheese and Olives from his Molto Italiano cookbook. The dish was molto fab. I omitted the olives, because my eating partner in crime, The Husband, doesn’t groove on olives.

The dish was very tasty, and so was the goat cheese from Bagliani’s.

Besides making a really yum-yum dish, I learned a valuable lesson – making roasted red peppers really isn’t hard.

Time-consuming, yes. Tricky, no.