Roasted Red Bell Peppers

Roasted bell peppers are one of those magical foods that are easy to make and go with just about everything. If I could have it my way I'd have a massive bell pepper plant that would provide me with an endless supply of big red bell peppers. You can eat them alone or use them as a "secret" ingredient in sauces. They can be mellow or spicy. But they always add a wonderful smoky flavor to whatever you use them for!

Bell peppers, who belong to the chili family, are originally from Central or South America and made their way to Spain along with chocolate. Yum! The misnomer is due to good ol' Christopher Columbus who sailed the ocean blue. Want another fun factoid about bell peppers? All colors of bell peppers, the green, yellow, orange and red all come from the same plant. To achieve the different colors you simply pick them at different stages of ripeness. The green peppers are the babies of the crew, they've got the shape but not much flavor. Whereas the red peppers are the old men full of life stories. All the other colors are somewhere in between, still in development but also have some flavor to add to the mix.

Red peppers tend to be a little on the pricey side so when I see them on sale I stock up and its a red bell pepper fiesta! Often I use them fresh in salads or pastas but without fail I make a batch of roasted red bell peppers. As I mentioned above the process is easy and you only need two ingredients: red bell peppers and olive oil. The following recipe has been handed down to me from my momma who got it from her grandma who probably learned it from her mother and so on and so forth. So here we go, I'm sharing my first family recipe. I have my hesitations, but really, everybody should know how to make something so yummy with so many purposes!

Ingredients

Red bell peppers

Olive oil

Gizmos and Gadgets

Baking pan

Chef knife

Tongs

Zip-lock bag or some sort of sealed container

Directions

Put the rack on the highest groove thing (anybody remember what those are called?) and turn on the oven to broil.

Slice the bell peppers into quarters, removing seeds and pith (the white stuff that has no flavor but does a fantastic job holding onto those seeds). Place cleaned quarters onto the baking pan skin side up and drizzle with olive oil.

Remove from the oven when the skins turn black, about 10-15 minutes. With the tongs (you can use your fingers, but I don't recommend it) put the quarters into the sealed container and let cool. When they are cool enough touch, take them out and remove skin. Due to the steam that has accumulated and if you let the skins blacken this should be a relatively easy process. Once they're cleaned slice the little buggers up into about 1/4 inch wide slices and serve, store or do whatever you want with!

*You can also put whole peppers on cooling coals and let them cook whole as shown in the picture above. Either way they taste heavenly! My biggest tip is to not let them cool completely. ie: don't put them in the fridge over night. Doing this kind of defeats the purpose of letting them sit in the container while still hot. I did that once and well, I learned my lesson!