cw (07/31/82)
Our garden is yielding a small supply of what the seed catalog calls hot peppers. These are not bell peppers, but about 4 inches long and fairly skinny. They do not smell as hot as the explosive fresh Mexican peppers you can buy in California supermarkets (those are so hot you have to wear rubber gloves to peel them or suffer skin burns). Now....how do I cook these things? What dishes would be good? I have been thinking along the lines of browning chicken, sauteing some of these peppers with onions (and maybe garlic), combining all this, and then cooking covered for a while with a little broth to make a thick sauce around everything. Does this sound reasonable and are there other things to do? Thanks in advance Charles
cak (07/31/82)
If they are as large as normal banana peppers, you can stuff them with a mixture of rice and ground beef, much as some people do with bell peppers. We always make stuffed peppers with banana peppers, and use about 2/3 mild and 1/3 hot. Serve with yogurt (plain, unflavored) if you want to preserve your taste buds. If they're too small to stuff, you can hang them up and dry them. Then use one instead of paprika, or whenever you want to spice a dish up. Use as a spice in Goulash comes to mind (I submitted a recipe to this effect some time ago). The other alternative is to fry them in oil and serve them as an appetizer or side dish/salad. This freezes very well. Chris Kent, Purdue CS