Roasting Pepper

Notice how I didn't title this post "Roasting Pepper-s"!  Why do I not know this by now? Roasting peppers is fast, and easy, but it does take a few minutes of commitment to go through the, sometimes, messy steps of the process.  Roasted peppers keep fabulously well in the freezer for at least one year, so doing at least 2 (one for another time) can come in handy...which is why you should do a bunch all at once!

I've been making baked curry beans in coconut milk using a recipe from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" cookbook that take 3 hours to finish.  10 minutes of prep (now 15 with the addition of a roasted green pepper!), and the rest of the time is simply baking in the oven.  So it's little trouble, but you basically can't leave the house for three hours!  I'll be happy to share the recipe with you another time, and my results, in fact I want to do exactly that, but it's late and I don't have the energy :(

But I will tell you that the recipe uses Kombu (seaweed) as a thickener and flavor enhancer.  Kombu is the type of seaweed used in Japanese cooking to make stock for miso soup and I just happen to have had some in my pantry from my recent interest in making my own miso soup!  Lucky me!

Anyway, I'm seriously hooked on these darn beans!  Lately they are

my favorite breakfast food, and after making them, now, at least half a dozen times I'm starting to tweak the recipe slightly to suit my own liking.  Tomorrow's batch will have a roasted green pepper added to it...not much of a tweak, but a tweak nonetheless!

I have purchased canned green chili's in the past but not for a long time and I didn't have an old can in my pantry, but that got me thinking....  I don't like to use canned products if I can help it, so I wondered exactly what was a "canned green chili", and could I make the product myself?  Was it pickled...I couldn't really place my finger on it.  So I googled it!  It turns out a canned green chili (Ortega is a popular brand) is simply Anaheim chili peppers roasted and canned in water.  No extra anything.  Um....a roasted pepper?  Geez, I knew how to do that myself!  So I did!

I've posted many times before about roasting red bells and jalapeno peppers, I've been doing it for years, nothing was different except the variety of pepper, and with Anaheim's I found that they blisters very quickly!  I'm pretty confident that my days of buying canned green chilies are over!

Here is a blog post I did with some step by steps; http://tracysfoodandthought.blogspot.com/2008/05/heat-is-on-in-more-ways-than-one.html.  

Have you, or do you roast peppers?  How do you use them?