smitten kitchen » Peppers

black bean soup + toasted cumin seed crema

deb — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:00:01 +0000

So, I told you about the brisket. Or, the way we talk about it, thhhuuuuh brisssssket, it’s deliciousness making our syllables stretch out melodramatically. We pulled it into tacos with slaw and pickled onions and it was a great end to a great year. But I bet I know what you’ve been wondering since then, “But no appetizer?” Well, let thie question vex your brain no longer: we had soup. (Jacob, however, got into the margaritas. Again.)

My friend Jocelyn made a wonderful black bean soup and she topped it with a toasted cumin seed crema and I just about died, the crema was so good. I mean, the soup was delicious but the crema was one of those toppings that was in lock-step with the soup: the richest, creamist, smokiest accent to a spicy, hearty soup. Since I’ve been slow cooker obsessed since that very day, I vowed to make a version entirely in my new BFF, and to top it with that toasted cumin seed cream. Frankly, the soup is just an excuse to get to it.

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jalapeño-cheddar scones

deb — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:41:15 +0000

I wore heels to the hospital when I showed up for my induction four weeks ago. Heels. And a sundress. Oh, and my mother and I decided to walk there from the doctor’s office, since it was such a nice day (we only made it ten blocks, but still). Heels. Sundress. A stroll on a lovely September day. I say this not to point out how ridiculous I can be — because really, I believe it points itself out — but to outline this thing I do where I get an absurdly ambitious ideal in my head and spend the rest of my time trying to close the gap between the dream and my reality.

Hm, perhaps that didn’t make much sense. Let me put it in food terms. Before I had the baby, I attempted to spend some time baking and stashing, no, not practical things like meals to save us from an endless rotation of diner eggs and takeout pad thai, oh please no. I made things like treats to woo extra-awesome care from labor and delivery nurses and granola bars that our families in the waiting room might enjoy and some date cake we could all enjoy with some fresh baby and coffee the next day. Like I said, absurd. I also imagined that we’d have an influx of visitors in the weeks after we took Jacob home, and realizing I’d have no time to put out my usual spread, decided to ambitiously bake some things we could set out as needed … like banana bread. And lemon cake. And scones. Except I only got to the scones. At least I picked good ones.

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summer pea and roasted red pepper pasta salad

deb — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:35:26 +0000

I’ve spent way too much time this summer trying to dream up a pasta salad that wasn’t boring, or predictable, or well, you know, the kind of familiar pasta salad territory you don’t need me to go over for you. Because I love a good pasta salad, I just don’t find them often. Usually, they’re missing the freshness you’d expect from something you eat in the summer, when the markets are bursting at the seams with peak-season produce. Often the dressing is a throw-away, either a too-plain vinaigrette or heaps of mayonnaise, lending itself to more of a mass than a salad. So I knew what I didn’t want, I just hadn’t figured out what I did.

Not for the first time, the inspiration came from a little French restaurant in our neighborhood, which along with the usual deliciousness — roasted chicken, steak frites, mussels, yes please — always tucks some sort of straight-from-the-market freshness on the specials. It said “Five Bean Salad” but what arrived was a plate, no, platter of al dente shell peas and snow peas and skinny green beans and fat yellow beans and sugar snaps and cranberry beans and favas, tossed in a roasted red pepper sauce with little bits of chevre tucked within. It was like a plate of summer, and even though I am so not the finish-your-plate-even-if-you’re-full-type the thought of letting even one fresh pea go to waste felt even more wrong and so I ate the whole thing and look at that folks! I guess preggo finally has her appetite back. Or was emphatically craving green vegetables.

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mediterranean pepper salad

deb — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:09:49 +0000

I have to own up to something: I’ve lost interest in leafy salads. There was a time when we filled out every dinner meal with mixed greens with a light vinaigrette and any plate without them looked sparse. But somewhere along the line, the world of lettuce has been so co-opted by bagged and pre-washed, chlorine-tinged flavorless green leaf-looking structures (what, do I sound like I have a bone to pick with them or something?) that not even fancy restaurants are a reliable source of good leafy salads anymore, and so, for the most part, I’ve bowed out, making only occasional exceptions made for nice greens mix or crunchy, velvety Bibb lettuce at a farmers market.

Leafy salads are overrated, anyway, especially in the face of the big crunch and longer fridge shelf life of mixtures like this. And well, I know that chasing chocolate snack cakes with such egregious healthfulness will likely encourage nothing but yawns, the truth is, little has changed since I coined myself months ago The Most Boring Pregnant Eater, ever, with my steady diet of grapes, raw broccoli and now sweet red peppers. [Don't worry, I still had ice cream for dinner last night, except it was actually a frozen yogurt shake with a cup of chopped mango blended in -- like I said, boring! ]

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chickpea salad with roasted red peppers

deb — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:57:05 +0000

I know, chickpea salad? What a letdown, right? Well, what can I say except that there is simply no way to chase cookies with bits of tangy toffee and bitterish walnuts in a cookie that is pure brownie awesomeness in the middle, replete with the shiny crackled lid…

I’m sorry. I just had to get one more. I can stop anytime. (Also, we’ll be out soon, anyway.)

But there must still be a place in our hearts and gullets for chickpea salads, lest I wish to be a story on evening network news about the crane that had to come and extract me from our walk-up when Alex could no longer roll me down the stairs. And this one–yet another great find from Deborah Madison–is no bad place to start: fresh roasted pepper strips, capers, a little mint and a little garlic, it was just another salad in a spread that has turned out to be one of my favorite thrown-together dinner parties in ages. Almost everything made in advance, I actually got to (get this) sit down and hang out with my friends! Revolutionary, I tell you.

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summer’s last hurrah panzanella

deb — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:05:24 +0000

In the last few days, New York City has gotten the most delicious nip to its breezes; drier air and clear skies have set in and despite that fact that I maintain that I don’t wish summer to end, it’s not holding up when I hit the Greenmarket and go a little berserk over apples and squash and things that have nothing to do with stone fruit. I’m a sucker for New York in the fall. It always wins.

Nevertheless, before I go whole-squash into the colder months, I had to have one last hurrah with summer before I admit that I’m finally no longer incessantly craving it, and there’s no better way to take in late-summer produce than with a panzanella. I’ve made this one before, but it was years ago, which means in Internet-speak, it’s probably dead to all of you and due for a revival.

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pizza with red and yellow peppers

deb — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:51:39 +0000

I hope you’re not pizza-ed out yet–and if you are, can you tell me your secret?–because I’ve got two more coming this week. Wait, why is everyone leaving? Come back!

To the four of you left, if despite all of my pleading and listicled efforts to convince you that you don’t need a pizza stone, pizza paddle, bread machine, dough hook or hours of free time to make awesome pizza at home, I’ve got one more for you: I made one of these with a broken oven. Or a mostly-broken one. Well actually, it was totally broken, but only for a few hours. Nevertheless, it was dramatic, as you can imagine; we’re quite fond of our flimsy, tiny Apartment Standard oven in the smittenkitchen.

You see, I had bookmarked yet another lovely, simple recipe from what I think we all know by now is my current favorite cookbook, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables a couple weeks ago, the Pizza with Red and Yellow Peppers. Yet I was concerned that I wouldn’t get the caramelized top I wanted by baking it in my oven–every oven is different, but mine simply does not excel in top-browning. So, I decided it would be time to take my own advice and such, and cook the pizza under the broiler.

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ratatouille tart

deb — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 04:04:55 +0000

When I made my version of baked ratatouille back in July, I had intended to follow up with suggestions of other things you could do with leftovers, or leftover ingredients, as I always have leftover components but have not yet found a store that will sell me two-thirds of one zucchini and a half an eggplant. I really hate having a quarter eggplant leftover, because I’m very unlikely to use it and incapable of throwing it away, so what usually happens is I stash it in the fridge where it gets forgotten about, rots, is found a month later as when I scream in horror and throw it away afterall, having flashbacks to that time I lived with three friends and we were cleaning out the fridge and found something completely awful way in the back and Dave said “sorry, that was my kiwi” and I was like, “uh, that’s a lemon.”

I digress. Here are some of the other ways we have used elements of this non-traditional “ratatouille”:

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couscous and feta-stuffed peppers

deb — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:37:53 +0000

I spent six hours on a train yesterday to and from my old stomping grounds, Washington D.C. I lived there for six years and haven’t been back in just as many, so you can imagine how crazy it was to only see twenty minutes of it, from a cab. With every turn, I jumped, remembering how we used to hang out legs out from that window above Dupont Circle over the sign for what used to be a hair salon, or that turn that always unnerved me to make from California to Connecticut and that block on Massachusetts Avenue not far from NPR where a hooker once flashed me everything as I gripped the steering wheel and willed the light to turn green already, PLEASE.

It was like confetti flitting around in a fan, all these pieces I had entirely forgotten about, like sanitized subways and the escalator at the zoo that is no less than a mile long, but others I couldn’t stitch together before we waded through the traffic to the next block. There are people who always remember things badly–high school, that terrible layover where we tried to fix our hangover in an airport bar, some years in a city others couldn’t wait to leave–but its all rose-colored glasses for me. Things are always best the way I remember them, which sometimes comes in handy when I’m in a pissy mood, or you know, trying to figure out what to eat for dinner.

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smoke-roasted stuffed bell peppers

deb — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:09:03 +0000

Whoops! I hadn’t meant to abandon you like that, we just didn’t have internet connectivity on our last two days of the trip. It was like 1999 or something. I got the shakes. So, where did we leave off?

After Day One at the wineries and Days Two and Three at the grill, we spent our last day on a barely too brief to mention swing into San Francisco where we wandered the Ferry Market Building and lunched at the Slanted Door with friends before heading up to Berkeley. We had dinner with a gorgeous group of food bloggers that evening at Oliveto in Oakland, and on recommendation from the lovely Shuna, breakfast at Mama’s Royal the next morning. In between these gullet-gutting excursions, we found some time on Monday to wander about the Berkeley campus where we wallowed in nostalgia for our unscheduled college days and once wrinkle-free foreheads (fine, that was just me) before jetting back to the land of late dinners, humidity and the daily grind.

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