Well Preserved

Mark Bitman grows on me every day.  The New York Times writer is also the author of two cookbooks I refer more to than all others in my kitchen combined (for the record, they are How To Cook Everything and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian).  He also introduced our house (and hundreds of thousands of others) to No-Knead Bread.   He has written a column named The Minimalist for the New York Times for 13 years.

He describes the Minimalist most eloquently below:

`A year later, the column was at least adolescent, and I described its typical recipes as I do today: nearly all of them use minimal technique, minimal time or minimal ingredients; many recipes meet two of those standards, and quite a few all three.`

Mr. Bitman announced the end of his column last week – and announced he would be moving to the Editorial section where he would continue to share recipes, simple food and his messages around food advocacy.  He chose to share 25 of his all-time favorite recipes on the Times blog this week.

As a send-off, we made his red pepper puree this weekend (this was one of the 25):

Rather than just lifting the recipe from his site, we’ll share a link here.

I did find his roasting temperature rather jarring.  I generally roast peppers under extreme heat and was skeptical of the results of roasting them at a much lower intensity (he recommends 475).  I actually went between 425 and 475 and found the results to be so remarkable that I`m not sure I`d ever go back.  The gentler heat requires less monitoring and the results appeared to keep more of the flesh in tact as the skin was removed.

Our final puree is pictured below (4 large bell peppers made 2 cups of puree).  We`ll share what we did with this (and how much we loved it) in the next day or so:

This was a not-so-gentle reminder that I need to follow more recipes to learn little tricks that I may never figure out on my own.  It was also delightfully tasty!