Recipe Reduction 76-75

Fried Pepper and Tomato Salad
from Breaking the food seduction

Some very interesting flavors going on here, and joy-on-joy, NO balsamic vinegar!

I would have called it a relish, not a salad. You simply fry red bell peppers in oil until they're really soft, add tomatoes, garlic and a pinch of sugar and salt, simmer until thick. It's very good, but...

I'm sorry to say that I've just found another food that I can't buy at the grocery anymore--
red bell peppers
Red aka **ripe** peppers are sweet and soft, but the ones at the grocery are sour and hard.  Let me give you a lesson in botany.

When fruit (peppers are fruit) is green, it is sour. When it gets ripe, it becomes soft and sweet. The color might be an advertisement to the animal world--time to eat! That's how fruit-bearing plants get their seed spread around--when the fruit is developing, it's hard and sour so animals don't eat it prematurely. When it's ready to be planted, it becomes soft and sweet. Along come the animals to spread your seed far and wide, fertilizing it as they go.

It's a great strategy and has worked for millenia, but them came big trucks. And cross-country travel. And even cross-continent travel. Ripe fruit is soft; it bruises and spoils. But mankind is smarter that nature--he realizes that fruit doesn't have to be ripe to be purchased, it just has to look ripe. It worked for tomatoes and now, I fear, it has started working for bell peppers.

In a way you could say that modern-day consumers are stupider than mice. Mice wouldn't keep on eating something hard and sour just because it was red and had the words "all natural" printed on the package. Mice would take a nibble, spit it out, and go on down the aisle to purchase a can of Spam.


Baked Cucumber Chips

(picture withheld because they look so unappetizing)

Theoretically it's possible to slice up cucumbers and bake them at a low temperature for four hours and they'll turn into chips. (American chips--not British ones) This recipe gives four seasoning options, so I chose to do onion-and-garlic plus salt-and-vinegar, at different ends of the baking sheet.

Sadly, it assumes you don't prepare them and then realize you need to use the oven for something else.  I have a two-oven stove, but with outside temperatures approaching 110F I chose to use only one. So the chips had to wait a long time and then only got an hour of baking before bedtime.  I turned off the oven and left them inside....

And sort-of forgot all about them.  A couple of days later they got another hour of baking and--hard to believe--got left in the oven again.

Five days later I tried them. The ones that were crisp were pretty good, but most of them were dry and leathery. Not their fault.

Good recipe; bad execution.