Everything I Made This Week using Jimmy Nardello Peppers

The thrill of buying and using farmers market vegetables before they go bad!

chicken thighs with jimmy’s and potatoes before

Scene Report from the Market
The stands this week were a study in seasonal transitions. Corn still piled high (thank you, SoCal endless summer), eggplants so shiny and purple, squash sneaking in, peaches holding on by a thread, grapes bursting out of their skins, you get the idea.

I zeroed in on some slender Jimmy Nardello peppers. If you aren’t familiar, they are a truly beautiful variety of sweet pepper in a flashy sports-car red skin, and they beckon to me like a late-summer swan song.

What’s with the name, you ask? The story goes that the seeds for this pepper were brought over by the Nardello family who immigrated to Connecticut from Southern Italy in the late eighteen hundreds. Jimmy, their 4th born out of 11 children, loved to garden and he was the force behind growing hundreds of peppers in their tiered gardens. This variety became known as Jimmy Nardello’s Sweet Frying Peppers and I have no idea how they maintained their popularity over the last 100+ years!

I quickly grabbed a handful with no set plan for how I would use them and I know that this is where a lot of us get stuck. We want to buy produce at the farmers market, we want to invest our money back into our community, but we also don’t want to end up confused by how to use something, or worse, letting food go to waste. Many times we are forced to stick to buying what we know - a haul of veggies and groceries that get us through the week instead of introducing ourselves to something new.

AND THAT TOTALLY MAKES SENSE!

The preciousness and cost prohibitiveness of produce these days can make it feel impossible to also be playful. So here is what I made throughout my very normal week of cooking and eating so I made sure these babies didn’t go to waste.

Everything I made:

• Scrambled eggs with sautéed Jimmy Nardello peppers, zucchini, and leftover shallot. I folded this mess into lavash bread, or I should say — I made this mess even messier by trying to use some crumbly dry old lavash I had in my fridge, and on top I chucked the handful of dill that hadn’t turned to mush yet, and some chopped cukes.

• I made a quick pesto for pasta and threw in a whole cooked Nardello to see if it would impart some sweetness and maybe even a little acid. It did! it was lovely.

• End of summer salad with seared Nardellos, aged cheddar, mint, grapes, cukes, warmed dates, and brioche croutons, this all sounds very fancy but was also just the ingredients I wanted to use up before they went bad.

• Soy marinated chicken thighs with roasted Jimmy’s and potatoes sheet pan style dinner.

end of summer salad

after!

All of which is to say, just get an ingredient and use it all up. Don’t feel pressured to make that ingredient the star, they can just be part of the dish wherever they fit in, end of story.