Oktoberfest = Pepper-Fest

October has been a real pepper fest for us. First, our fabulous vegetable box came with lots of beautiful sweet Italian peppers. These, in combination with the mini heirloom tomatoes that arrived, prompted Dave to inform me: "we got the prettiest vegetables this week!" And sure, enough we did! Now, what to do with them?

We were inspired by dinner at our friends' house in Oakland. They served a delicious spread of sweet peppers marinated in olive oil, ripe sliced tomatoes, thinly sliced cucumber, yummy olives, and sliced bread. Wonderful! And this was just the appetizer course. We went home knowing what we would do with those beautiful little peppers just waiting for us. We roasted in the oven:


Then removed the skins and seeds as delicately as possible and sliced them as our hosts had done the week prior:

When finished, they looked lovely, drizzled with olive oil, and otherwise unadorned. We were amazed at how good they tasted for so little seasoning - really none!

We also came across the "new hotness" as Dave called it while we were buying olives at Andronico's: piquant peppers. I had not heard of them, we thought we would try a couple, along with cured olives and a few sundried tomatoes.


The roasted peppers along with the store-bought cured peppers became the center for a simple meal served fire-side of bread, bountiful salad, a little brie, and plentiful wine.


The roasted peppers keep quite well in olive oil and we were able to incorporate them into several meals throughout the week as well.

Then, more peppers arrived with our next box! This time a different kind of pepper: Padron peppers - theoretically from the Padron region of Spain. This being another new item in the box, we checked the internet for what to do with them. Consensus seemed to point to frying in olive oil and sprinkling with sea salt. What could be easier?


These peppers are sometimes called Russian roulette with peppers as 1 in 10 are spicy hot, the rest are mild and sweet. We had a couple hot ones and I let Dave eat those. We hypothesized with our low sample data that the larger ones were spicier, but I cannot say for sure with n=11.