So what does one do with a pound and a half of homemade Ricotta. It’s a bland and boring cheese, so in addition to the basil, I add about a quarter cup of finely minced sundried tomatoes and grind some fresh black pepper over it. Another pinch of salt won’t hurt either. Then I turn my attention to peppers.
Again, Serious Eats (Joshua Bousel) inspires this appetizer, but again it’s not exactly what he had in mind. His recipe, which look amazing, calls for fresh hot cherry peppers, which is not something I’m going to find in my city in the dead of winter. I end up with a jar of Peppadews, and only then find a jar of cherry peppers for one-third the price of the Peppadews. Oh well. BUT when I empty them out to drain them, I see that the Peppadews are already stemmed and seeded and beckoning in perfect little cup shapes. The cherry peppers will need lots of work and attention, plus half of them are green and gross looking. I peek inside one and discover they contain approximately one thousand seeds each, and handling them is like working with wet toilet paper. So don’t cheap out on peppers – that’s the lesson I’ve learned. Cherry peppers, meet the garbage can.
(Cool, artsy shadow photo.) I rinse and soak them in fresh water three times to get rid of the briney taste, then pop them in a low oven for five minutes to dry off a bit. I also think this is a perfect job for my mini-muffin tin.
After careful consideration, I decide the best way to stuff these little guys is with my patent-pending piping bag (sandwich bag with hole cut in it). This does not go well. The hole splits open due to the thickness of the cheese. So I swear to God I do this: I tie off three fingers and the thumb of one of my (food grade) rubber gloves that I keep around the house for chicken salad and meatball making, cut a little hole in the tip of the remaining finger (middle one, of course), and stuff the glove full of cheese. This works like a dream, but I include no pictures because it’s super weird and serial-killer looking. Each little pepper gets around half a tablespoon of cheese mixture.
Then I simply cut the prosciutto into strips, wrap each pepper, and secure with a toothpick. Here’s a tip! If you pierce them slightly above the halfway point of the pepper (the equator), they will dangle on the muffin pan rims! Minimal clean up! (I think to myself, wrongly.)
Into the oven they go at 400 for around ten to fifteen minutes. The result?
Meh, I have to say. There’s a lot of big flavor going on, but most of it comes from the peppers. The briny vinegar taste is overpowering. When you get all the flavors at once – creamy cheese, salty prosciutto, briny peppers – it’s pretty neat, but I wish I had been able to find fresh peppers. I give this recipe a 6 out of 10 – it’s lovely and impressive and takes a lot of fiddly fussy work, but the peppers just didn’t quite work out.
illdothedisheslater 