Wednesday, September 9, 2020

September 10, 2020 - This Week's Box Contents, Featuring Sweet Peppers


Cooking With This Week's Box








Red Seedless Watermelon AND/OR Melon: Watermelon Margarita






Red Pepper, Tomato and Lentil Salad
Seasonal eating means waves of vegetables coming at you in the peak of their season and this week we’re riding a pepper wave with a focus on the sweet side of this crop!  There are so many different things you can do with sweet peppers, which makes it very hard to choose just one or two recipes to feature!  This week I settled on Melissa Clark’s Sweet Pepper and Cheddar Clafoutis (see below) recipe from her cookbook, Dinner in French: My Recipes by Way of France.  Clafoutis is traditionally a dessert made with sweet cherries, but Melissa turns the concept into a savory main dish and it’s excellent!  Clafoutis is kind of like a rich, French frittata.  It is essentially a baked custard made with eggs, milk and crème fraiche.  If you have access to crème fraiche, I encourage you to use it.  If not, you can substitute sour cream.  This dish works as a main dish for breakfast, lunch, dinner or brunch and leftovers reheat well.  Before I move off of the topic of sweet peppers, I want to call your attention to a few recipe favorites from our archives including this Red Pepper, Tomato and Lentil Salad we featured last year and Creamy Roasted Sweet Pepper Dressing featured back in 2014.  This dressing is versatile, but this week I want to use it as a dip to eat with carrot sticks or drizzled over slices of fresh tomatoes!

Grilled Corn & Poblano Tacos
photo from loveandlemons.com
We’re not done talking peppers, but lets switch gears and talk about the hot peppers in this week’s box!  This is the perfect week to make Creamy Chicken & Greens with Roasted Poblano Peppers since we have both chard and poblano peppers.  You could also make these Grilled Corn & Poblano Tacos, garnished with fresh tomatoes and cilantro.  While I was poking around at loveandlemons.com, I found a few other interesting recipes that are appropriate for this week’s box contents.  I want to try this Roasted Beets & Chickpeas with Jalapeno Yogurt using this week’s beets.  This is a vegetarian main dish salad with spicy chickpeas and roasted beets drizzled with a sweet and spicy garlic, lime and jalapeno yogurt sauce.  And the last recipe suggestion from this site is a Watermelon Margarita that also makes use of some jalapeno for a spicy kick to this cocktail!

Before tomatoes are finished, we need to get our fill of fresh tomato salsa and you can eat it on more than just tacos and with tortilla chips!  Consider making this Pan Grilled Salmon with Tomato Salsa for dinner and serve it with Corn, Roasted Red Pepper and Cilantro Salad.

Roasted Tomatillo Chicken Enchilada Pie
photo from littlespicejar.com
Remember back to the end of July when we had just started picking tomatillos and featured them in the newsletter?  You might want to revisit that Tomatillo Feature Article which included a list of twelve different recipes featuring tomatillos.  Now that the temperatures are cooling off, I think it’s time to make this Spicy Chili Verde with White Beans.  This recipe calls for jalapenos and canned green chilis.  You could use a mix of jalapeno and poblano peppers.  I think I’m going to go for this Roasted Tomatillo Chicken Enchilada Pie which calls for poblano peppers as well as the tomatillos.  This recipe calls for spinach, but since we don’t have that this week I’ll substitute rainbow chard.  Round out this dish with onions, garlic and cilantro, also in this week’s box!

This week’s beets and carrots are like nature’s candy and they’re excellent candidates for these Maple Roasted Beets and Carrots, a delicious side dish for any simple dinner of roast chicken or grilled steak.  Of course you could also use both of these roots raw to make this simple Shredded Beet & Carrot Salad.

This brings us to the bottom of another bountiful box of produce!  Lets cross our fingers that we’ll get a few more weeks of warm weather to continue ripening and harvesting tomatoes and peppers.  Before you know it, we’ll be harvesting leeks and will be packing winter squash in your box!  Have a great week!---Chef Andrea  

Vegetable Feature: Sweet Peppers

By Chef Andrea

Orange Italian Frying Peppers
Late August and early September marks the peak of pepper season.  This is the time of year when the field changes from a sea of green to a colorful array of orange, red and yellow.  Several weeks ago we featured poblano peppers and we’ve been including a jalapeno in your boxes since mid-summer.  We still have one more tasty hot pepper to share with you, but that selection will need to remain a mystery as it’s not quite ready.  So this week we’ll turn our attention to the sweet side of our pepper crop.

It’s a shame that the family of sweet peppers are so poorly represented in many traditional grocery store produce departments.  While red and yellow bell peppers are lovely, there are so many other varieties of sweet peppers and many of them have better flavor!  Over the years we’ve grown to appreciate other varieties such as Italian frying peppers which are delicious eaten both raw and cooked.  Richard has also developed our own seed stock for orange Ukraine peppers which are not available commercially.  They are similar to a bell pepper, but have a pointy tip and a thick flesh.  They are an excellent pepper for roasting or stuffing.  And then there are the sweet Mini Sweet peppers.  Long before this became a mainstream pepper selection a CSA member encouraged us to try growing these snack peppers.  Seed wasn’t commercially available so we had to start by buying a pack of peppers from the store, picking all the seeds out of them and starting down the long road of producing our own seed.  Many years have passed and we continue to produce our own seed for this crop despite the fact that seed is now commercially available for snack peppers.  We continue to trial these varieties, but we continue to favor our own seed line as the peppers simply taste better!

Orange Ukraine Peppers
One of the reasons I like to eat and cook with peppers is because they are so versatile in the ways they may be used, but they also pair well with a wide variety of vegetables and ingredients.  They pair well with summer vegetables in dishes such as ratatouille, but they also pair well with root crops, winter squash and sweet potatoes.  You can use sweet peppers in salads, salsa, soups, curry dishes, stews, on pizza, in quesadillas and so much more!  They are also super easy to preserve, which is why I always make sure I have enough in the freezer to last me until the next crop comes in.  Freezing is the easiest way to preserve peppers.  All you have to do is wash them, remove the stem and the seeds and pop them in a freezer bag.  To conserve freezer space, you might want to dice, slice or chop them into smaller pieces. In the case of mini sweet peppers, however, I just freeze those whole.  Pull them out in the winter and add them to egg dishes, soups, stir-fry, casseroles, chili and so much more!

Roasting Red Peppers over a gas burner
The other thing I want to mention about sweet peppers is how they are transformed when roasted.  The natural sugars in the peppers are developed in the roasting process and the texture becomes silky.  If you’ve never roasted peppers, it’s quite easy.  It’s best done over an open flame such as a grill or a gas burner.  If you don’t have either of those, you can also roast them under the broiler in the oven.  I typically roast them whole, but you could cut them in half and remove the stem and seeds before roasting.  You want the skin side to be in direct contact with the flame or heat source so you can roast them until the skin is blackened and blistering.  Remove them from the heat, put them in a bowl and cover them so they steam as they cool.  Once cool enough to handle, use the back of a knife to scrape the skin off the pepper.  Once roasted, you can use the peppers in vegetable, grain, bean or pasta salads.  You can use them to make a creamy roasted red pepper sauce to serve with pasta or chicken.  You can add them to sandwiches or quesadillas.

It’s best to store fresh peppers at room temperature, although you can store them for several days in the refrigerator.  If they start to get a little soft or wrinkly, they are just starting to dehydrate a little bit but are still very usable.  If you do have more peppers than you can use this week, take a few extra minutes to pop them into the freezer.  You’ll be glad you have them this winter!

Sweet Pepper and Cheddar Clafoutis

Note:  Clafoutis is a custardy, baked dessert originating in France.  It is traditionally filled with sweet cherries.  This is Melissa Clark’s savory spinoff on this French dish and it’s delicious served as a main dish for breakfast, lunch or dinner!  If you don’t speak French, you can also refer to these as really good “cheesy eggs” as Farmer Richard refers to them.

Yield:  4 to 6 servings

¾ cup whole milk
½ cup crème fraiche (may substitute sour cream)
4 large eggs
2 ½ Tbsp all-purpose flour
¼ cup chopped fresh basil leaves
¾ tsp fine sea salt, divided, plus more as needed
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 cup (4 oz) coarsely grated sharp white cheddar, cheese, divided
2 ounces sliced ham, chopped (optional)
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
3 sweet peppers, (red bell, orange or red Italian frying peppers or orange Ukraine peppers) OR ½ pound mini sweet peppers
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
¼ cup (1 oz) grated Parmesan cheese
Fresh lemon juice, for serving
Crushed red pepper flakes, for serving

1. Heat the oven to 375°F.  

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the milk, crème fraiche, eggs, flour, basil, ½ tsp of the salt, and pepper.  Stir in ¾ cup of the cheddar and the ham (if using).

3. Prepare the peppers by removing the stem and seeds and slicing into ¼-inch slices.


4. In a 9-inch ovenproof skillet, heat the oil over medium heat.  Stir in the peppers and cook until they are softened and golden at the edges, 10 to 15 minutes.  Stir in the garlic and remaining ¼ tsp salt and cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes.

5. Scrape the egg mixture into the skillet, and top it with the remaining ¼ cup cheddar and the Parmesan.  (Or for a more elegant presentation, scrape the vegetables into a gratin or casserole dish and add the egg mixture and cheese to that.) 

6. Bake until the eggs are set, 35 to 40 minutes.  Cool slightly, then top with lemon juice and red pepper flakes.

Thinking Ahead:  
You can cook the peppers and garlic up to 3 days in advance.  Store the mixture, covered, in the refrigerator.  Gently rewarm it in an ovenproof skillet before adding the egg mixture and baking.
Recipe borrowed (with minor adaptations) from Melissa Clark’s book, “Dinner in French:  My Recipes by Way of France”

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