The Perfect Pepper

Today Gary harvested a few peppers. I planned to make a warm wild rice salad. When Gary brought the peppers up from the lower garden I saw the perfect pepper. It was a single carmen pepper with a dark dusky red color and it was very long. In fact the pepper was 10 inches long and perfectly formed.

I began to wonder why I was so enamored with this particular pepper. Wasn't it just a common pepper from a garden plot? No, I could see this was a special pepper. It represented the fruits of more than sixty years of labor, of trials and tribulations in growing produce, trees, shrubs and flowers for food and pleasure. Today I realize simple lives of labor yield many, many bits of perfection, apropo for labor day.

I hesitated, I didn't want to eat the pepper it was too beautiful, too perfect. I didn't want to cut into it. What should I do? I knew if I let it go, it would just rot, so I decided to prepare it. I carefully sliced it down the sides so I could lie it flat. I planned to roast it to blacken and remove the skin. I removed the seeds and stem along with three gypsy peppers.

I placed them in my oven on broil. I have never used my oven on broil before, the peppers all turned out just fine, especially the perfect pepper.

After broiling, I placed the peppers in a bowl covered with saran wrap to aid in removing the skins. The skins came off easily.

For the salad, the wild rice was set to cook for an hour to be nice and soft. While the rice was cooking, I chopped four tablespoons of scallions, quartered seedless green grapes, halved mandarin slices, plumped the raisins, sliced two juliete tomatoes, and cut up the roasted peppers. I prepared a dressing of three tablespoons of orange juice, two tablespoons of flavored vinegar, two tablespoons of olive oil, and salt and pepper.

Once the rice was cooked I let it cool a bit then added it to the fruits along with the dressing and stirred it carefully. Let salad sit for half an hour to meld the flavors. This salad is one of the most delicious salads we've ever had; we both had two helpings. I'm sure the perfect pepper had a lot to do with this.