Seeing Red

Now is the time for red bell peppers. Market stalls are piled so high, you can walk away with huge ones for $1 apiece. That's a mammoth savings over the always high supermarket price of $4.50 a lb because for, say, $3 you can get three very large peppers that weigh at least that. So now is the time to buy up red peppers and savor them.

I so badly lose control when I see them at $1 each, I grab at least six, sometimes even a dozen. I've been making that red pepper sauce recipe in How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers' Market for years now and know how perfectly it will freeze and later brighten a winter meal. Make it healthier too because this is just packed solid with vitamin C, something you can really use in wintertime.

And it has so many wonderful uses right now. I can put it on cavatelli or ditalini or any small pasta with fresh shell beans as a vibrant, vivid sauce. Nothing beats it on steaks including flank steak or hamburgers: forget ketchup. Forget the butter for your baked potato too and slather this on. Ditto corn on the cob. It's great with scrambled eggs and vegetable omelets, and is a perfect mate for cornmeal pancakes. And how it makes even tofu tasty!

The other joy of red peppers right now is that you can roast at high heat (475) or grill them about 15 minutes until they char and soften. Pop them in a brown paper bag, close it and wait another 10-15 minutes. This will help you peel off that colorless outer skin very easily. When the peppers are cool enough, you can cut them in halves or thirds or quarters, depending on their size, seed them, salt them and lay them out on a plate. If you like the daisy petal pattern, go for it. At this point, you can do whatever you want: put a dollop of soft cheese (fromage blanc, goat cheese, ricotta salada) on each one, smear a thin coat of black olive paste or just sprinkle a bit of olive oil over them and serve. Or you can smear on soft cheese, lay on a small thin strip of salami and roll them up to serve with a toothpick. You can also do the same with a thin coating of egg salad on them.

Another option is to just lay one on top of egg, tuna or chicken salad in your sandwich. Put it inside grilled cheese, or as I sometimes do, lay one on top of an open faced toasted cheese sandwich for a great breakfast.
But whatever you want to do for this healthy and picturesque vegetable, hurry up. Red peppers are the end of summer: frost will take them away and you'll be back to paying dearly for them in the supermarket.