Peppers, The Prequel

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By Lisa

The padrone-eating incident (now updated with pictures) was not without precedent.

One of our family staples, especially when it’s high pepper season, is dish of roasted red peppers bathed in olive oil, with capers, garlic, and anchovies.

Before you stop reading at “anchovy,” please consider this: a mysterious alchemy occurs when the peppers meet anchovies and garlic in a bath of olive oil.   The peppers mellow and deepen in flavor, the anchovies sweeten and lose some of their bite.  You can choose not to eat the anchovies.  Or if you are still squeamish, you can, if you must, leave them out altogether, though you will be missing something.

I have served this dish many, many times at parties, to unsuspecting friends, and it disappears quickly. I have served it to children, at dinner parties–not just my own–who have devoured it.  I have served it to my father-in-law, who hates anchovies, but still loves the peppers.

Truly, this is a dish that is more than the sum of its parts.

Every Sunday, all summer long, I made a large dish of these peppers and stashed it away in the refrigerator to marinate. I am not exaggerating when I write that this dish came out nearly every night, as appetizer or side dish. Ella tucked into it with abandon, piling her bread high with peppers, sprinkling a caper or two, then soaking the whole thing in a spoon or two of the marinating oil.  By the end of the summer, even Finn, who is a more cautious eater, was fighting her for a pass at the olive oil, which is liquid gold in its own right.  At parties and barbecues, Ella’s self-appointed job was to make the plate of the pepper-crostini. They’re bright and pretty on the plate, and they go just as well with beer as with prosecco.  We never got tired of them.

In the winter time, or for big parties, I make the same dish from jarred roasted peppers. In summer, when peppers are in season, I bring home my weekly stash of red, yellow, chocolate peppers, and roast them on the grill. If I’m really pressed for time, I can throw the peppers in the convection oven, but they aren’t quite as good this way.  It will keep easily for a week, covered in the refrigerator.

The recipe comes from the pages of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking,  one of my go-to books when I have a fresh, local, seasonal ingredient and want inspiration.

Below is the basic recipe, with my notes & variations. Once the peppers are roasted, there’s nothing simpler. Consider it insurance for those pre-dinner hunger attacks.

Roasted Peppers with Garlic, Capers, and Anchovies

Ingredients:

  • Roasted peppers
  • Whole smashed garlic cloves
  • Capers
  • Anchovies
  • Oregano
  • Olive oil
  1. Slice peppers. Smash garlic cloves with the flat edge of the knife, peel and discard skin.
  2. Layer peppers in a shallow, flat bottomed dish. On top, place a smashed garlic clove, 2-3 anchovies (or more or less to taste), a sprinkling of capers, a sprig or dash of dried oregano.  If you roast the peppers yourself, you might sprinkle a very little coarse salt on them. Do not do this if the peppers are jarred.
  3. Repeat the layering process until your peppers are gone.
  4. Bathe the entire dish in olive oil.
  5. Refrigerate overnight.
  6. Serve with sliced Italian bread

Ingredient notes:

Peppers:  Red are traditional and the sweetest, but try different varieties as accent colors and flavors if you’re so inclined.

Anchovies: Only buy anchovies packaged in glass (not tins). My experience has been that the more you pay, the better product you get. There is a vast difference in quality between cheaper and more expensive brands.

Oregano: Dried is just fine. Fresh sprigs are fine.  My favorite is to dry sprigs from my bush, and use these. They’re pretty and flavor is best.  If you use dried sprigs, you’ll likley need only 3 or so for a large dish.

Capers: If you use salt-packed, rinse them well.

Olive oil: Just a good, decent extra-virgin is fine. Nothing fancy. You need a lot of it, so I just pour from whatever big tin I’ve got on hand that week: Sagra, Whole Foods, etc.

In the case of this recipe, for me, omissions are very often accidents. I’ve forgotten to add: capers, oregano, salt. I’ve run out of anchovies before I started, then it was too late to get to the store. You can assemble it meticulously, so it looks like a beautiful strata of color, or you can throw it together in a haphazard flash.  The dish may be best with all of the ingredients, but it’s still delicious in whatever configuration you and your family prefer.  Just don’t leave out the garlic.


Some Like ’em Hot, a Pepper Conundrum

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By Lisa

Most of the time, we want our kids to eat what we eat, right? And most of the time, we work really hard to get them to eat what we put on the table, right?

It’s been our general philosophy that the kids eat what we eat. End of story. In our home, this has happened pretty much since birth.  Both were breast fed, so they quite literally ate what I ate.  Both had fewer jars of baby food than I can count on my hands.   I steamed, mashed, pureed, froze.  And now both eat what I cook or they don’t eat at all.  Evidence the new chalkboard door as Exhibit A.

This has generally made for a happy and stress-free family food life.

However, there are some things that Kory and I jealously keep to ourselves. Things we don’t want the kids to eat because that means, well, less for us.  And while we want our kids to have good taste, and to taste good things, some things we just don’t want to share.

One of these things is pimientos de padrones,  grown by Happy Quail Farms.

Padrones are small green peppers, flash fried in olive oil, sprinkled with coarse salt, some are hot, some are sweet, all are addictively delicious.

They’re eaten tapas style. We eat them every week in the summer. We serve them at every party we give. We bring them as hostess gifts. They never fail to please.

Kory and I discovered padrones nearly the moment they were introduced to Happy Quail’s gorgeous kaleidoscopic stand of peppers nearly ten years ago, and like the rest of the fanatic cabal, we spoil ourselves on the bags of green gold weekly ($6) when they’re in season .  As far as we know, Happy Quail is the only producer of true padrones in the area, and they supply markets and restaurants throughout the Bay Area.  The legend I remember of their local origin, told to me by the farmer more than half a decade ago, is that a faithful Happy Quail customer, dining in Spain on padrones, decided that Happy Quail needed to culitvate them and smuggled back the seeds….

And so, for many years, Ella and Finn have seen the padrones on our table week after summer week after summer week.  We haven’t offered them to the kids, or have done so only half-heartedly, in jest.

But the moral of this story is that it is absolutely true, that boring, old-fashioned truism that your mother and grandmother and all those expert books tell you: expose a child to something for long enough and she will eventually eat.  Just leave it there on the table, within reach, within eyesight, eat it yourself. Just wait and see. I dare you.

Because one very sad-happy day, Ella ate a padrone. And there was no turning back.

And from that day on until the end of padrone season, If Kory & I didn’t get to the table fast enough, they’d be gone. Plucked from the plate like so many pieces of candy in the hands of a more normal child, they’d disappear down her gullet faster than she could say “Polly-Piper picked a peck of pickled….”  The only good thing to come out of it (for me and Kory) was that our lovely pepper farmer presented Ella with her very own bag of padrones the next week at the market, with the benediction, “Welcome to the Club!”

Of course, this kind of growth is what one wants for one’s child isn’t it? A life full of education and opportunity and new experiences?

It’s wrong to hoard, I know.  One is supposed to overflow with goodness, selflesslessness, and generosity for one’s children. One is supposed to share.

Whoever thought that one up probably never had a padrone.

Feeding 3 Generations

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by Caroline

My parents are visiting from Connecticut this week, and for me it’s a good excuse to slow down and spend a bit more time in the kitchen. I won’t spend every free minute writing or editing; instead, I’ll go through the binders full of torn-out magazine and newspaper recipes, page through the dozens of cookbooks on the kitchen shelves and look for renewed inspiration. Instead of spending all of Eli’s preschool hours at my desk, I’ll probably go to the market.

My parents don’t ask that I do this; for them, simply gathering around the table, all six of us, is really more important than the food we eat. They like a nice meal but aren’t terribly picky.  And this is why it’s such a pleasure to feed them. My children lately drop foods from their diet more quickly than they add them. Ben is down to only one kind of cheese, even a particular brand of that cheese, and will only eat it cold, in slices (not grated nor melted). I know this stage will pass, and so I’m not pushing the boys to be what they aren’t. Tony and I will keep trying to set a balanced, interesting meal on the table every night, and hope that the boys will taste what we offer before filling up on plain pasta or bread. But of course, the discussions of what they won’t eat get wearying, and more often than not, Tony and I don’t have the energy to make something creative that we know the boys won’t even touch to their lips. So we fall into a rut of the few simple pastas and vegetables the boys will eat without complaint.

My parents’ visit offers me renewed energy. Here are two eaters who will try almost anything, who don’t at all mind our vegetarian diet, who can be counted on to help prep and clean. They even eat leftovers.

But their first night, I didn’t expect any of that from them, nor did I try out any new dishes. You never know when you pick people up from a flight if they’ll be starving or full of airplane snacks, but either way, I figured they’d want a simple warm meal.  I made soup. I’ll post the steps here — it’s hardly a recipe, since I eyeballed everything — and the result was delicious (and unlikely ever to be replicated). The boys didn’t eat it, as I expected, but they were happy with the salad and bread and cheese on the side, and the meal was a nice way to start our visit.

Squash Soup for Travelers at the End of a Journey

Preheat oven to 400.

No matter what direction I’m taking the squash soup (curried, spicy, etc) I always start by following the procedure Deborah Madison suggests in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone: halve the squash, scoop out the seeds, and then put 4-6 unpeeled cloves of garlic in the cavities. Drizzle some olive oil on the cut edges of the squash, and then set them, cut sides down, on a large roasting pan. Roast until the squash is tender, 30-60 minutes, depending on the size of the squash.

While the squash is roasting, you can saute some diced onion with herbs (thyme, sage, bay leaves are all nice) or without, until the onion is nice and soft. For the soup I made this week, I skipped the herbs, planning instead to grate fresh ginger into the soup. Perhaps deglaze the pan with a big slosh of wine. Remove the bay leaves (if you used them) and put the onions into your blender.

When it’s finished roasting and cool enough to handle, scoop the cooked squash into your blender. Squeeze the roasted garlic out of its skins into the blender, too. Blend, adding some water or stock if necessary to thin it; you can always add more water, stock, wine or (if you’re feeling decadent) cream when you’re heating up the soup.

Transfer the pureed squash to a sauce pan to finish warming. Thin with stock or water to taste, and season with salt and pepper. At this point, I grated a thumb-sized knob of fresh ginger into the pot, which melted nicely into the soup and gave it a gingery warmth without getting spicey.

Chez Nous

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by Lisa

For as long as I can remember I have wanted a chalkboard wall.

I have suggested: the back of the front door, the interior kitchen doors, the children’s exterior hallway doors, the outdoor fence.

It has all come to naught.

No one in my family has understood this deep longing.

Until now.

A few weeks ago, driven by one of the energy-rich auras that is the only good thing about the migraines I sometimes get, I drove to the paint store, bought the paint, the rollers, the foam brush, the drop-cloth, and Finn and I painted the door separating the office from the dining area of our kitchen.

The result:  a blackboard, a backdrop, a place to announce the daily menu, or list snack options, or brainstorm, or party plan, or simply write a story or learn letters.

It’s been a big hit.  I write our menu daily.  Ella adds to it & then some.  In between, she writes lists, teaches FInn letters, writes stories. Both kids get a big kick out of it.  We tend to have little complaining about dinner. Now we have almost none. Though I do expect the novelty to wear off. Soon.

The first night, pictured above, we had a new dish: Potato Leek Soup, a cheese board, roasted peppers, yellow beans, bread.

Another night, it was all about pie: Cheese pie (actually, quiche, which in fact has no cheese in it, but more about that in another post), Green Beans, Apple Pie.

And it helped to have an artist in the family on Halloween for the party. The Horror D’oeuvres Menu looked like this:

It’s for breakfast, lunch, and everything in between. It may not have improved our cooking, but it’s somewhat improved the dignity of our meals.

‘Tis the season… Pumpkin Bread

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by Caroline

This time of year, I start baking even more than usual  and Eli doesn’t want to eat anything but another quick bread, be it apple, pear, banana or pumpkin. So I get him to bake with me, which he is happy to do, wielding his whisk with great care. I also try to adjust the recipes a bit to make them more nutritious; he thinks he can live on bread alone, and with this and some milk or yogurt on the side… Well, I still want him to eat green vegetables. But this is pretty good.

I started with a recipe from Gourmet magazine which hasn’t turned up on line yet; I cut the sugar, replaced the white flour with whole wheat, and replaced some of the oil with ground flaxseed. It’s light and delicious.

2 c whole wheat flour

6 T ground flax

3/4 t baking soda

1/2 t ground cinnamon

1/4 t ground allspice

1/4 t ground cloves

1/4 t ground ginger

1/4 t salt

2 large eggs

1/3 c water or milk

1 c brown sugar

1 c pumpkin puree

3 oz vegetable oil

1 t vanilla extract

1 c chopped toasted walnuts (optional; I leave them out because the kids don’t like them)

Preheat the oven to 350 and line a 9 x 5 inch baking pan with parchment.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in one bowl, then whisk together the remaining ingredients in a second bowl. Add the wet to the dry and whisk until blended and smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake for 45 minutes, until the bread is firm to the touch and a tester inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean. Baked goods with flax in them tend to brown pretty quickly, so if your bread is getting  dark and the loaf isn’t cooked through yet, just cover it lightly with foil and continue baking.

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