Roasted Red Peppers

This morning I was in the grocery store, in the produce department and there was a display of red peppers.  Red peppers are something I've really gotten into recently and are absolutely delicious so I thought "Hey, I'll pick some up and make a red pepper sauce!"

Background on the sauce (don't worry, the recipe will follow):

Several years ago, I was living with my friend Nedra.  Nedra, if you do not know her, has food allergies, most importantly, to citric acid.  It's something your body needs, yes, but she can't have more than that baseline or she kind of... vomits everywhere and goes into a semi coma.

This means she can't have regular tomato sauce.  She developed this recipe so she could have red sauce on pasta.  It tastes remarkably like tomato sauce, if not as acidic, and even people do don't like red peppers (like the boyfriend) find themselves loving this recipe.

Aaaaanyway, as I was getting a bag, a woman next to me was looking for some peppers, picking through them. I offered her a bag and she said that she wouldn't need one.  She was probably going to eat them right away.  I mentioned I was going to make pasta sauce and she kind of went "Whaaaaaa?"

So I started to explain the process, stopped, and she urged me to continue.  Here's how you make it.

Roasted Red Pepper Sauce:

6 red peppers

olive oil

1 onion, roughly chopped

5-6 cloves of garlic

1 T dried parsley

1 t dried oregano

1 t dried basil

1 t dried rosemary

1 t dried thyme

a splash red wine vinegar

salt

pepper

Directions:

Roast up those peppers!- there are several ways to do this.  If you have a gas range like me, stick them straight on the flame until they are completely charred.  If you do not, coat the peppers with olive oil, put them on a baking sheet and roast them in the oven until they are all charred, rotating them if necessary.  Once they are roasted, put them in a bowl and cover with a towel to cool and steam to make those skins easier to take off.

While your peppers are roasting/steaming, chop up the onion and start them sweating in the olive oil with some salt and pepper.  Add in the dried herbs and garlic (you can chop up the garlic but I used my microplane to grate it in there... because I have it and I wanted to....) and saute until everything is all nice and translucent.  Add in that splash of vinegar.  Why the vinegar?  I was going to use wine... but I didn't have any. So I used a splash of vinegar instead.

Now the fun part with the peppers.  Peel off the skin.  It's messy.  So messy.  But worth it.  Don't fret too much about making sure every last bit of char and skin is off.  The more char you leave in, the smokier it tastes and I'm a fan of a high carbon diet so it's up to you.  Just make sure you pull out the stems and seeds.

Then toss everything in a blender, the peppers, the onion mixture, have a blast!  If it's too thick and not blending properly, splash some water in.  How chunky you want it is up to you.  You can have it fairly thick or smooth.  I won't know.  :)

Now you have this excellent sauce!  What can you do with it?  Well, you can use it just like tomato sauce, over pasta with some parmesan.  Or maybe in place of sauce on pizza.  Or a dipper for garlic bread.  Yummm.  

So enjoy the sauce and here's to some summer eating!  I plan on writing more often now it's summer.  That seems to be when I'm most inspired.

Happy eating!