Roasted Red Peppers

Roasted red peppers are a family favorite where I come from. Desperately simple and absolutely delicious. If you don’t care for raw garlic, you can feel free to omit. If you love garlic - you may add a little extra like I did. If you are using the garlic, make these the day before you want to eat them so the peppers have time to marinate in the garlic and oil. These make a great component for an antipasto platter and they go great with roasts, porchetta, or grilled chicken. I am a big fan of eating them in pepper and cheese sandwiches. What I am saying is, basically, they make everything better.

Ingredients:

6 red peppers

6 cloves garlic

1/4 cup EVOO

Set the oven to 425 degrees and arrange the peppers on a baking sheet. Once the oven is at heat, put the peppers in for 20 minutes until they puff up and start to blacken. Using tongs, flip the peppers over, and put them back in for another 20 minutes.

Once both sides have puffed and blackened pull them out of the oven. At this point my mom usually puts them in a paper bag to cool, I never have a paper bag around so I just put a sheet of tin foil over them. Leave the peppers to cool until completely cool - for me this takes around an hour.

Once the peppers are cool, the skin should slip off pretty easily. Remove the skins and seeds and cut the peppers to your desired size. Thinly slice garlic, and layer the peppers with garlic. Cover with the olive oil and refrigerate overnight. I imagine these would last a week or two in the fridge, but frankly we eat them too fast to know for sure.