As in red peppers.  Roasted red peppers.

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Funny story.  The first time I attempted to make roasted red peppers I assumed it was like roasting any other veggie.  Chop it up, put olive oil on it, and put it in a 425 oven for 15ish minutes.

Wrong.

Not to mention I also left the dish in the oven, went outside to work on the front yard and completely forgot about the peppers.  What we ended up with was more like charred pieces of what was at one time, pepper.  Good one Sara.

When it comes to cooking though, I learn my best lessons through failure.  So Ralph thank you for putting up with me through burnt peppers, salty pancakes, and maple frosting that pretty much tasted like pure butter.  So I learned my lesson and did some research before trying to roast red peppers again.

This time the plan was to put them into hummus.

My first attempt at homemade hummus w/ lemon, artichoke and garlic

Because you know, we do that now.  Make our own hummus from scratch.

So apparently you are NOT supposed to chop up red peppers to roast them.  You roast them whole, in a really hot oven until they turn to delicious soft roasted peppery goodness.  I’ll spare you any “before” pictures because I’m sure you all know what red peppers look like.  And when they come out of the oven all roasted? They just look like burnt up deflated balloons.  Sounds really appetizing right? Well I promise they smell amazing.  I roasted 4 medium-ish red peppers in a 500 degree oven for 34 minutes – turning them over after 17 minutes.  Once they were done I covered them in foil to cool and promptly got distracted with whatever house project we were working on at the moment.

Cut to – time to make the hummus!

Killing it with the super appetizing pictures right now.

I really wanted to test my cooking skills and see if I could make this without a recipe.  Cocky much?  Maybe.  Thankfully it turned out really good or I wouldn’t be sharing it here.  Here’s what I ended up with.

2 cans chickpeas
2 1/4 roasted red peppers
3-4 cloves of garlic (I used raw but will probably use roasted garlic next time – I like the flavor better)
1/4-ish cup Tahini (in truth it was more like a few heaping tablespoons because of my aversion to actually measuring things.)
drizzle of olive oil (2-3 tablespoons?)
salt to taste

I’ll be honest, it took a little bit of trail and error to get to the final recipe.  First it was too heavy on the garlic, then not enough salt, but I played around with it until Ralph deemed it “money”.  Yes I could have easily looked up a recipe online somewhere and followed that.  But I always get some weird sort of satisfaction from not really knowing what I’m doing and then ended up with a success.  Maybe that makes me strange.  Oh well.

What new recipes have you been whipping up lately?

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