charred peppers; charred cherry tomatoes; charred onions; mix leafy greens; fresh basil; bacon; feta cheese; and garlic olive oil
When I do not have to eat any starch, I like to use certain vegetables as starch replacements. Broccoli and especially its stems are great replacements for pasta, cauliflower for rice, and so on. Your imagination is the only limitation in terms of replacing empty starch with something substantial.
Of course, starch has its place, I am after all a baker by nature, and I love rice with anything really. But when you add starch to your plate just for the convenience or the habit of doing it, it becomes a problem and basically empty starches.
Only then does starch become unhealthy in my opinion.
This time round, I replaced the empty starch (or pasta) in my lunch with charred peppers and onions. I also added a bunch of other vegetables with some bacon as well.
I also added a healthy amount of garlic olive oil which brought the dish together in its strange amalgamation with the fresh basil and indigenous herbs.
Note: Please see my Fermented Menu in which all of my other recipes are taken together and presented in one post. I will periodically add my new recipes there.
Without further ado, please follow along with me as I show you how I made this delicious and healthy dish!
Recipe/Ingredients List
Depending on how big portions you will make, and if you want to use this as a side dish or a main dish, but I got three medium-sized bowls from the following ingredient amounts:
- three medium bell peppers,
- one medium onion,
- a handful of leafy greens (I used amaranth, spekboom, sunrose, garlic chives),
- a handful of basil leaves,
- two closed of garlic,
- one small tray of cherry tomatoes,
- three pieces of large/thick-cut bacon, and
- a couple of teaspoons of olive oil.
I finished the dish with a couple of pieces of feta cheese that I sprinkled over the dish.
Process/Method
As with all my recipes, the process starts with cutting one's vegetables into smaller pieces. This dish involves a lot more cutting because of the amount of vegetables I used. But whilst the bacon pieces was cooking and rendering out the fat, I began by cutting all of my vegetables.
I cut the onions and cherry tomatoes in the following ways:
I then went on to cut the bell peppers into smaller pieces that kind of resemble elbow pasta shapes.
After cutting all of these vegetables, the bacon will be cooked and most of the oil will be rendered out of them. I will then use all of the bacon fat to fry and char the vegetables with.
When the bacon fat is nice and hot (in a different pan), I char the onions first. I do not cook them fully, I merely "burn" or char them a bit. I love this flavour combination, the still somewhat raw onion and the charred onion sides.
I then proceed to char the cherry tomatoes, also in very hot bacon fat. When you char cherry tomatoes in this fashion, you get a delicious caramelized flavour but one that is not too sweet. The cherry tomato flavour basically intensifies.
Now that the pan is still very hot, with some pieces of cherry tomato still in the pan, I add some more bacon fat and all of the bell peppers. Because there are quite a lot of them, it will deglaze the pan in some sense, so that the charring stops. But I cook the peppers also very quickly so that they do not become soft, thus resembling al dente pasta to some degree.
After this is done, I finish with the leafy greens. They really just need half a minute's cooking to be done. I add them to hot oil to also get some charred effect going.
When everything is charred and cooked, I add them to a bowl. I also add the fresh herbs (spekboom, sunrose, and Basil leaves) at this stage. If you add the basil and other fresh herbs at the very end, the flavour becomes intense in a good way. The basil, for example, retains its fresh taste, and this will be accentuated by the olive oil that I infuse with the garlic.
The Garlic Oil
I wanted to make a kind of aioli, but this did not plan out as well as I thought. The aioli never formed and the olive oil did not emulsify with the garlic. But this did not matter in the end, as when I added all of the oil to the dish, you did not see that the sauce was essentially "split".
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I began by smashing the garlic in my mortar with the pestle. I tried to make a smooth paste. I then added oil and I carried on smashing the garlic. What should have happened was that the oil needed to emulsify with the garlic. But as you can see this did not happen. Luckily, a split sauce like this does not affect the taste or even the texture.
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Even though the sauce did not work out as I planned, I was happy with the taste.
Enjoying the Mixture of Charred Vegetables
When you mix everything together, finish it with some feta cheese crumbs on top, you will then have the most amazing and healthy dish! It takes some time to make, with all of the charred vegetables and so on, but in the end, it is really worth the effort.
The base idea or recipe of this dish is a quick fresh basil bacon and cherry tomato pasta - a dish that I have made myself countless times and which I have eaten at restaurants countless times.
I had many bell peppers, and I did not feel like having pasta, so I tried to turn the bell peppers into pasta! And I think it worked, for the most part. Obviously, bell pepper pieces will never become pasta, but this pasta-less alternative of a pasta dish I made for myself was really something special in the end.
You don't need to eat starches with every meal, especially when you make it out of habit. Experiment and try something different!
In the end, experimentation when cooking is the ultimate form of art. Recipes are made in this way, and sticking to what you know can become boring - even if you perfect that one recipe! At least, in my opinion, always experimenting with cooking is fun.
For now, happy cooking and stay well!
All of the musings and meanderings are my own, and the recipe is also my own. The photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone.