You know it's not sunlight that ripens tomatoes, it's actually warmth. So if you just keep your tomatoes out of the refrigerator on a counter and store them stem side down, they’ll ripen faster and they’re going to have a lot longer life.
When you buy a fresh basil, bring it home and put it in a glass of water, but never put it in the refrigerator, it hates to be cold. It will stay like this for weeks, so sometimes even sprout roots. If you grow your own basil, you should trim it regularly, because regular cutting encourages new growth.
One of my favorite treats is roasted red peppers. But they taste a lot different, when you make them yourself than when you buy them in a jar in the supermarket. So this is actually something very easy to do at home. You can do it right on the burner of your gas stove. Simply you need a high flame and a fresh red pepper. Then you start by putting it right on the fire. You’ll need a good set of tongs handy, as well as a little plastic bag. Then we just wait. What you’ll start seeing is charring. You might hear some popping or sizzling noises, but that’s supposed to happen that’s the moisture coming out of the pepper as it cooks. Here’s some of the charring that’s beginning to happen.
You’ll just turn this gradually to where the black is evenly around the whole skin of the pepper. You can also see where it's starting to change colors as it is cooking underneath the skin from this bright red to more of a subdued orange color. This gives it a wonderful smoky, I think incredible flavor that you just can't get out of a jar.
Now, once we’ve cooked this to an even blackness all the way around, we simply pop it in a plastic bag and seal it. What that does is it steams so that it softens the black skin on the outside and then when you remove it from the bag, the skin just slides right off. You’ll need to wait until it cools to be able to do that though. So I'm going to go ahead and finish charring mine and we’ll come back once it’s cool. I think we’re about there. All right, so that’s look like a nice and evenly charred all around.
Our next step is simply to place it in a plastic bag. And then we’ll seal the bag to allow the steam to gather until the pepper is actually cool, then we’ll remove the bag, when we do we’ll remove the skin at the same time. So we’ll come back when that’s cool.
Our red pepper is cooled now. And we can actually use the bag to start peeling away some of the charred skin. A lot of it will stay in the bag, it may still have some black bits and that’s why I brought a little water over. We’ll just dunk it in and out really quickly then. Isn't that pretty, that’s gorgeous soft flesh, it's just beautiful. That makes a lovely addition to any pasta with some grilled meat or fish. And just gently rinse off extra charred. There you have it, your own roasted red pepper that you made all by yourself. Nice work!
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