The Recipe Room

Among our repertoire of appetisers, starters, and snacks, is roasted red pepper bruschetta. We’ve been known to whip some up for a light supper, or to accompany a light salad or soup, like this rich and tasty watercress soup. The red pepper is such an evocative taste of the Mediterranean for me. I remember the smell on the nights my mum flame-roasted them on a small fire, blackening them before peeling off the skin, rinsing and deseeding them, and then adding them to salads, pastas and of course bruschetta too.  For more toasty bread and salad sensations, try this warm chicken salad with garlic and tomato bread.

Mama would also store them in jars to add wonderful flavour into other recipes. If you have the option of flame-roasting your peppers, I would certainly recommend it for this roasted red pepper bruschetta. If you have a gas hob, you can roast them straight over the flame, staying close by, and turning them as you go with metal tongs. If you don’t have that option, then conventional oven roasting is also great. If you want to speed this recipe up massively, you can buy and use really tasty roasted peppers in jars.

Do you ever make time to cook up a three course meal at home just to share some special time with your other half? It’s hard for all of us to make time for that, I know, but it’s something that Teresa and I like to prioritise. Because we find cooking relaxing and fun, some weekends find us together in the kitchen – glass of wine in hand, and conversation flowing, chopping knives doing their work in between sips of the red, or the white stuff. We can catch up on our week together this way.

On these days it’s a regular pleasure for us to put together a borlotti bean and tuna antipasto as a warm up to a plate of clam linguine (if we’re having a seafood night) followed by some home-made tiramisu. On these special nights, we lay a beautiful table, light a few candles, and get the music flowing. Ah, the simple pleasures of life.

Italian food isn’t all pasta. Being so near the sea, we also appreciate fish. Tuna, whether in a salad as a Tuna Nicoise or with vegetables, is a great main ingredient for an Italian meal. It is such a deliciously robust fish that you can combine it with strong flavours like roast pepper and rich black olives.

Sadly, the highly respected conservation organisation WWF has forecast that Mediterranean bluefin tuna, may soon be driven to collapse. So if you cook this fish, please make sure it’s from a sustainable source such as the pole-and-line method. Tuna have been around for millions of years. Only if we harvest them responsibly will we be able to continue to enjoy putting them on our plates!

Ingredients:

• 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1/2 a lemon
• 1 litre of water
• 2 red peppers quartered or halved, and deseeded
• 10 black olives (optional)
• 2 Tuna steaks, of whatever size you prefer (Between 80-160g each should be sufficient, depending on how hungry you feel.)
• 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar

Method:

1 – Squeeze the juice from the lemon into the water and soak the tuna steaks for 10 minutes. Then drain and brush them with about half the olive oil, and season with salt and pepper.

2 – Preheat the grill and cover the bottom of a roasting tray or dish with a large sheet of tinfoil.

3 – Put the peppers in under the grill for about 5-10 minutes. Then place the tuna steaks next to them for another 10 minutes. Keep an eye on the fish and vegetables, turning the tuna over mid-way. Remember, you want the peppers to char a little, but you don’t want to overdo the tuna.

3 – When the pepper begins to blacken, take it out and allow it to cool for a couple of minutes. When the tuna is cooked, turn the grill off and fold the foil over it to keep it warm and moist with the lovely lemon and pepper juices. Leave the foil-covered fish under the cooling grill. Carefully peel the pieces of pepper – they should still be nicely hot – and then slice them into chunky strips. Toss the pepper and olives in the remaining olive oil along with the balsamic vinegar.

4 – Serve the tuna on warm plates with the pepper, olives and other vegetables on the side. A soft, floral dry white wine, like a pinot grigio, is a good accompaniment.

Serves: 2

Time: 40 minutes: 15 minutes preparation, 25 minutes cooking.

Note: As I am a vegetable nut, I put lots of veggies in the dish along with the red peppers.