This bright colourful salad is one my favourites and is a great addition for a summer barbeque. Roasting the peppers and then peeling off the skin gives a gorgeous sweetness that creates its own dressing and makes them far more digestible than uncooked peppers. I used red, yellow and orange peppers for this salad with a ripe Tesco organic goat's cheese. I used to use green peppers but I find them bitter and difficult to peel. I will often cook peppers before I go to bed and leave in a cooling oven. It makes peeling the peppers a doddle.
For the dressing I used my Wild Garlic and Basil Pesto but you could use just a standard
basil pesto. Making your own is easy and does not use some of the less savoury ingredients that commercial varieties use, for example rape seed oil and citric acid. Home made just tastes better and not so bitter. Mine is just pine nuts/basil/extra virgin olive oil/parmesan cheese and basil with either garlic or wild garlic leaves. https://www.thehealingpantry.co.uk/post/wild-garlic-pesto-with-basil-and-walnut
Make sure that your goat's cheese is ripe. You can heat the goat's cheese in the oven for 20 minutes at 180C to soften it up a little if you prefer. Such salads should always be served at room temperature as they will loose their flavour if too cold.
Be sure to use organic peppers as peppers are high on the Dirty Dozen list - i.e. a lot of pesticides are used whilst growing. You can often see the pesticide residue as a slight bluish bloom caught in the indentations on the pepper. That makes them marginally more expensive, but your health is worth it. Peppers are full of Vitamin C.
Serves 6
6 mixed organic peppers - red, orange and yellow.
1 tbs home-made pesto
2 tbs extra virgin organic olive oil
pink Himalayan salt
1 organic goat's cheese
1 tbs toasted pine nuts
handful black olives
1 cup Healing Intent **
1. Heat the oven to 180C. Wash each pepper well and cut in half lengthways. Remove the stem and the seeds. Place them face down on a baking sheet and cook for 40 minutes. Switch off your oven and leave them to continue to cook in a cooling oven. You don't want them to be burnt.
2. Remove the peppers from the oven and peel off the skin (they should be easy to remove at this stage), then cut them - or tear them - into petal like shapes and arrange on a serving platter around the goat's cheese.
3. Mix the pesto with the olive oil and salt to taste and arrange over the peppers. Finish with black olives and toasted pine nuts. Serve with fresh foccacia.
Enjoy.
** Healing Intent: when cooking foods to heal the body it is important to set your intent. The best way to do this is imagine that you are cooking this dish for yourself or for someone you love who is very ill and that this dish is the only thing that will help in their healing. You will find that the way you handle the food will change, and will not only result in a better dish, but you will feel the food actually nourishing your body and spirit.
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