ROASTED RED PEPPERS

A low-calorie but flavorful red pepper salad

Safeway got in their first carload of really cheap red peppers yesterday, and I made roasted pepper salad.

Serve this at room temperature as a side dish for anything Nicoise or Spanish or Greek or Egyptian. Or make a meal of them by adding a bowl of yoghurt, a bowl of chopped onion, some black olives, radishes, and pistachios, and lots of warm pita bread. Or use it with sautaeed garlic and pitted black olives and a little reduced white wine as a spaghetti sauce.

Ingredients

(Serves 4)

Procedure

  1. Preheat broiler as hot as you can get it. Turn red peppers under the broiler until their skins come up in black bubbles. Cool the peppers until you can handle them comfortably.
  2. Remove the skins, stems, cores, and seeds. (This is messy work. I have tried removing the innards first, before putting the peppers under the broiler, and the result is not so good as this way.)
  3. Cut the peppers into finger shapes. Flavor them with fresh lemon juice and salt.
  4. Let them sit for several hours, draining off the liquid that forms.

Notes

Now. Here is the real point about this recipe: These roasted peppers are insanely delicious, smooth and unctuous and aromatic, and yet they contain absolutely no calories. A full-sized red pepper is only 15 calories.

Of course I could lose weight if I never ate more than three tablespoons of anything. Any fool could do that. But I don't want to confine myself to three tablespoons. Perhaps my tastebuds work more slowly that other people's. I don't seem to get the hang of what I'm eating till the second serving, or sometimes the third.

At the same time, I want things that are really voluptuous and good to eat, full of interesting, complicated flavors that will satisfy me and make me feel happy and rewarded. Again, any fool could lose weight by eating celery stalks and carrots. Unfortunately, any number of carrot sticks over six makes me grumpish, and raw celery turns me positively surly in short order unless accompanied by delicious, fattening sour cream and cream cheese.

Rating


Difficulty: easy.
Time: 15 minutes preparation, several hours aging.
Precision: no need to measure.

Contributor

 
Mary-Claire van Leunen 
DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, California, USA 
mcvl@src.dec.com -or- decwrl!decsrc!mcvl
Recipe last modified: 6 Jul 87

Original header

Path: decwrl!recipes
From: mcvl@src.dec.com (Mary-Claire van Leunen)
Newsgroups: alt.gourmand
Subject: RECIPE: Roasted red peppers
Message-ID: <12446@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: 15 Apr 88 05:33:46 GMT
Sender: recipes@decwrl.DEC.COM
Distribution: alt
Organization: DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., USA
Lines: 71
Approved: reid@decwrl.dec.com


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