Roasted Bell Pepper Obsession

Sometimes I cook a dish not to feed or for a subtle balance of flavors, but out of single-minded, monistic, shameless, worshipful obsession. It works like this: I didn’t need four adjectives to describe this kind of obsession, especially not both of the first two. But to have more of one thing, I need a variety of sameness. How do I create more roasted bell pepper? By adding other things, flavors spinning around a center always just to the side of roasted bell pepper. The center is almost the sauce, everything bound together in cream. The other things are just drawn out aspects of the original: bacon smokey like them, smoked paprika essentially the same as them, but dried and powdered. Then there are those forgotten things: onions and garlic sauteed in olive oil. What metaphor to turn to (the search for which is itself a good metaphor for what it is to organize a dish around a single ingredient)? Melody, harmony, and rhythm?

1 pound tiny yellow, orange, and red bell peppers
1/4 pound bacon ends
1 smallish onion
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
a pinch of black pepper
salt to taste

Chop onion and garlic finely. In a large saucepan on medium-low sautee onion and garlic in olive oil. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Stir every few minutes. Heat a large cast-iron skillet to medium heat. Cut tops off of bell peppers, slice in half, and de-seed. Drop bacon ends into skillet, then bell pepper halves. Stir bell peppers when bottom sides blacken a bit. When bacon ends are a little charred, and majority of bell peppers are somewhere blackened, transfer into large saucepan with onion and garlic. Mix together and add smoked paprika and black pepper. Add heavy cream. Stir every few minutes while the sauce thickens. It should take maybe fifteen minutes to thicken. When it’s the right consistency to stick to pasta, add salt to taste.

A Particularly Rough Day in the Life of a Saucepan

Sometimes, I wish I could taste. Almost every day I'm filled with substances that my owners find flavorful. And sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be them. But I know that it is their place to taste, and mine to hold and to heat. Well, no, I don't actually heat--something else heats me and I heat the things my owners eat.

I have my good days, and I have my bad days. It's hard to know which are which. There are the days I luxuriate in the darkness of the cupboard, and days I reach a several hundred degrees, containing fireworks of oil and water within my walls. Of course, there are those times I'm left in the sink filled with grime and water for hours or days.

Today was nuts. I was not in the sink an hour before being scraped clean in a rush and thrown back onto the heat. It takes some time for me to warm up. My owner threw slabs of butter onto my surface, and I turned them to golden puddles. I don't normally melt butter at this temperature. It was bit invigorating. Sugar weighed down on me. This is why I'm made of metal, and not, say, paper. A paste of sugar and butter scraped me like sand as he mixed it. But it takes something much worse than sugar to actually scratch me.

There were apples, too. It all became molten soon enough. Wet apples clung to my surface and, cringing, I burnt them. At such moments I feel a pang of regret and anger at myself or at my owner, I can't say which. It is his neglect but my flesh. I got the feeling he was being especially negligent today, because rather than carefully maintaining the arrangement of apple pieces held within me, the spatula was flung every which way as he mixed them into a messy pile. Beside me I heard the frantic motions of a rolling pin. It did not take long for the molten sugar to begin to burn. There is something in the way it bubbles that gives it away. Atop me he threw brown scraps of dough like the ad-hoc furs of some barbarian. Most of the gaps were closed before I was thrown in the oven.

Waiting in the oven is different than the usual kinds of waiting I do--waiting in the cupboard, waiting in the sink--because, like him outside in the kitchen, I am anticipating being removed from the oven. In the cupboard and in the sink I don't get so anxious because I know I could be there for a long time. I'm never in the oven for very long, though I never know exactly how long. I keep wondering if the crust is browned enough, if he will be satisfied with how the crust looks. He opened the oven at least a dozen times during my stint in the oven this time.

When he finally did take me out, he ran a knife along my walls, as he usually does, to detach the crust. I do wish he would find a better way to flip me over. It makes me nervous being spun about like that, although honestly at some level I hope he does slip, drop everything including me (I'm metal, I can take it), and spill burning tart all over him. But yet again, he didn't. He did burn himself on my handle though. I suppose you could say I burned him. But really, he should've known better. I wonder why he's so clumsy today.

Like I said, just a quick scrub and I was put back at it.

As the ripping sounds of vegetables being sliced apart reverberated through my metal curvature, I became increasingly hot. Oil slipped across me, pooling on one side. This is why I have walls. My owner dropped the sliced vegetables onto me, and I made them sizzle. I could feel them slumping and sweating against me. What does a shallot taste like? A heap of broccoli interrupted my speculations. He didn't let the shallots develop their flavor, he was hasty. He usually leaves onions, which are similar enough to shallots, sauteeing for much longer. He was acting strangely.

The vinegar and olive brine barely touched me, becoming puffs of steam on contact. He covered me up, trapping clouds in my interior. Water collected in droplets inside my cover, and streamed down the sides. More water was splashed in from a cup, and more. Vapour spat out my sides.

The flour he sprinkled in just turned to tiny lumps. My task was basically done, then just a container into which more was dumped: shrimp, salt, pasta. For a moment he slides me back onto the heat, but takes me off again. That's it. I've been left in the fridge ever since. I'm used to waiting.

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."

when there's too much basil and some tomatoes are on the verge of rotting... and bacon

4 medium-small fresh tomatoes
2 strips bacon
1/2 of a medium onion
1 clove garlic
1/2 lemon
small handful of julienned fresh basil
2 springs fresh oregano
1 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste (you probably won't need it, the bacon is of course salty)

Chop the half onion and garlic as finely as possible.  Sautee in a bit of oil on medium-low heat (don't burn).
Chop the two least ripe tomatoes into small chunks.  In another pan with a little oil at the bottom simmer these tomatoes.
Stir the onions and the tomatoes every couple minutes.  When the onions are fairly soft (10-15 minutes?), chop the bacon into small pieces and add to the pan of onions.  Turn the heat up a little, and fry for two or three minutes.  Then add the simmering tomatoes, and the black pepper.
Slice the remaining tomatoes radially, julienne the basil, and pick the leaves from the oregano stems.
Once the sauce in the pan is very thick, add the remaining tomatoes, basil, oregano, and squeeze the lemon half.  Cook just until the basil is wilted.
Eat over pasta.

Without Vodka

Those bottles of pink sauce in the store always seem to list vodka in their ingredients, but I have to wonder if it imparts any particular flavor, being vodka. This sauce is similar, but less tomatoey, and with mushrooms and pine nuts. [And wine, though it's quite good without it.] Recipes are generally presumed to be finished. But I've varied this sauce so many times... Sometimes more tomatoes, sometimes fewer, sometimes tomato sauce (though I really don't recommend tomato paste--that gives it a sickly, blunt, cardboard flavour), sometimes no mushrooms or pine nuts. And I've tried varying the herbs a lot. Paprika might be nice. Hot chiles are what you would expect--and some people I'm sure would really hate the result. Rosemary is probably a mistake. Sage would certainly kill it. If you have it, fresh oregano and basil really are vast improvements over themselves dried.

1/2 onion

1 1/3 cups heavy cream

4 roma tomatoes

6 crimini mushrooms

2 cloves garlic

4 tablespoons grated parmesan

2 tablespoons pine nuts

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon dried oregano (or 1 tablespoon fresh leaves)

1 teaspoon dried basil (or about 10 fresh leaves)

[1/2 cup white wine]

Oil a large saucepan on medium-low heat with 2 tablespoons olive oil and melt 2 tablespoons of butter in it. Put a small saucepan on medium heat. Chop finely onion and garlic and transfer to large saucepan. Don't let the onions burn. Toast pine nuts in small saucepan until well browned but hopefully not blackened. Put pine nuts aside in a bowl. Oil small sauce pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil and turn heat to medium-low. Slice tomatoes into quarters and then 5mm slices and transfer to small saucepan. Don't let the tomatoes stick to the pan. Add a pinch of salt to both pans. Chop mushrooms in half and then into slices and stir into large saucepan. The goal here is to cook the onions until soft and at the same time begin reducing the tomatoes into a sauce. Add black pepper, oregano, basil to large saucepan. [When onions are mostly cooked, add white wine and let it boil off for a minute or two.] Once the onions are done, transfer the tomatoes to the large saucepan. Stir in heavy cream. Once the cream begins to boil, adjust the heat so that it boils just gently. Add toasted pine nuts. Reduce sauce to an almost pudding-like consistency, occasionally stirring to keep from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Grate in parmesan while stirring. Salt to taste. Remove from heat. Serve over pasta.