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Colorful Red & Yellow Bell Peppers: Recipes to Add Color to the Table Yes, These Are Healthy Recipes Too! |
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Two recipes to make good use of the colorful bell peppers that show up in early fall. The first is a quick sauté. The second is a pickle which may be canned or kept for a few weeks as a refrigerator pickle. Both add so much color to a table!
COMPLIMENTS!
The farmers market is bursting with garden produce. There’s no resisting the baskets of sweet peppers in bright summer skins of red, yellow and orange.
Here in the Midwest, August and September are when savvy shoppers purchase peppers in the farmers market. They are often smaller and misshapen and the flesh is thinner. But they are often quite inexpensive: I've seen ten for $1.
PIED PIPER PICKLES Clean 2-1/2 pounds of red and yellow sweet peppers. Cut each into six pieces. Place in boiling water for three minutes, then drain. Meanwhile, combine 2 cups sugar, 2 cups tarragon vinegar, 2 cups water, 1/2 teaspoon celery seed, 1/2 teaspoon mustard seed, 2 cloves crushed garlic and 1 teaspoon pickling salt in a Dutch oven. Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes. For refrigerator pickles, pour hot liquid over drained peppers. Transfer to storage container and refrigerate.
To can, pack hot peppers tightly in hot sterilized jars in rotating X fashion skinside down. Fill jars with hot liquid leaving half-inch headspace. Process for 10 minutes. Makes four pints.
SAUTÉED RED & YELLOW PEPPER RELISH
Total preparation time: 25 minutes
8 servings
- 0 - 1 tablespoons butter
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 onion, thinly sliced lengthwise
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 2 sweet red peppers
- 2 sweet yellow peppers
- 1/3 cup pitted Kalamata olives (about 24)
- 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
In a large skillet, heat butter and oil until hot. Add onion and garlic. Sauté until golden, about 5 minutes.
While onions are cooking, slice peppers thin lengthwise, then halve. Add peppers to skillet and sauté about another 10 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and sauté 5 minutes.
Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature with grilled pork or chicken.
It's a lesson learned the hard way. It takes less time to sauté vegetables when there's more fat in the skillet. That's why so many recipes call for 2 tablespoons (or often four tablespoons) of olive oil or butter per pound of vegetables. But if we slow down a little, we can use less fat and save a pile of calories. The recipe for the SAUTEED RED & YELLOW PEPPER RELISH was first published in 2003, a full two years before I started to write my blog about vegetables, A Veggie Venture. Quite quickly, I learned that one tablespoon fat per pound of vegetables is plenty nearly all the time and results in just one Weight Watchers point (old points) per serving with four generous servings. And that's how I make the recipe now, with just one tablespoon of fat, 50:50 butter:olive oil or 100% olive oil.
Do you have a favorite recipe that other Kitchen Parade readers might like? Just send me a quick e-mail via recipes@kitchen-parade.com. How to print a Kitchen Parade recipe. If you like Kitchen Parade, you're sure to like my food blog about vegetable recipes, too, A Veggie Venture. "Like" Kitchen Parade on Facebook! More Bell Pepper Recipes
~ Stuffed Peppers ~
~ Peperonata with Potatoes ~
~ more pepper recipes ~
from A Veggie Venture, my food blog
© Copyright 2003, 2014 Kitchen Parade
We did the relish tonight, it was so good! I added a little Parmesan at the end too. Thanks for the recipe!
ReplyDelete7/06/2007