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The pièce de résistance for my 2010 Christmas Eve menu was Beef Wellington, and I was serving mushroom soup as the first course, so I wanted an appetizer that would go with the menu but would not include pastry or mushrooms. That’s harder to do than you’d think – so I decided to look through my cookbooks and see what I could find. I hit on the idea of making a pipérade while paging through Gerard Hirigoyen’s The Basque Kitchen. I’d eaten a pipérade before at Hirigoyen’s namesake restaurant and I had quite enjoyed it.
I followed Hirigoyen’s recipe, with a few modifications. His recipe called for Anaheim chilies, and all the ones I could find at two supermarkets were green – but the pipérade I had @ Pipérade featured red chilies, and the chilies shown on the picture next to the recipe for the pipérade in Hirigoyen’s book were also red, so I decided to use red bell peppers instead. I later found out by reading The Cooks Thesaurus that Anaheim chilies are, indeed, green. They turn red when they mature and are then called chile colorado or California red chile. I’m not sure if Hirigoyen meant that those chilies should be used on this recipe. No matter, it worked well enough with bell peppers.
The original recipe called for 6 eggs. I had meant to add them, but by the fourth egg it as clear that the concoction was waaaay too eggy. Indeed, if I was to make this again I’d only add 1 egg, 2 tops (and the recipe below has been modified to show this). Finally, I added some chopped prosciutto to the final product. Pipérade is traditionally served with a slice of Bayonne ham, but I wasn’t concerned enough about authenticity to go searching for that. The prosciutto I got at the deli counter @ Lucky wasn’t very good, though, so I recommend you stay away from it.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the recipe:
Pipérade

As my frequent readers know, I have a hate-hate relationship with vegetables. We were a meat and gnocchi family when I was growing up, but once in a while my parents decided that we needed to eat vegetables. They would then proceed to make puré de espinacas, or spinach puree – a combination of boxed mashed potatoes and boiled spinach (or most often Swiss chard, as it was significantly cheaper) put in the electric blender until a disgusting green mush was formed. They would then force us to eat it – and I do mean force us. They’d threaten us, hit us and even physically close our mouths if we didn’t eat it. More than once we ended up throwing it up (which only made them madder). This is definitely one of my childhood traumas, and as a result of it my siblings and I don’t eat vegetables (my youngest sister, born much later and not subjected to such torture is a happy veggie eater).
Slowly, however, I’ve been trying to overcome this trauma – making myself eat roots, mushrooms, salads and the like. But cooked veggies have been difficult – until a few months ago when, prompted by moans of pleasure by my fellow diners at a girl’s nights out at Mua in Oakland, I tried their version of collard greens and fell in love. The soupy, softish veggies had been cooked with bacon (and I don’t know what else) and had a very strong smoky flavor that I loved. I wanted to make them myself, and Christmas Eve seemed to be the perfect opportunity.
I didn’t find Mua’s recipe, but I hoped this one from epicurious.com would be close enough. Alas, it wasn’t. The resulting greens were pretty good – I still ate them – but they didn’t have the smokyness and didn’t end up with a broth. I enjoyed them well enough during dinner, but nobody had seconds and we didn’t eat the leftovers.
I followed the recipe below closely, but I used half as much collard greens (4 lbs is way too much, even 2 lbs were more than twice as much as we needed for 6 people eating it as a side). If I made this recipe again, I’d probably also use more bacon.
Collard Greens with Red Onions and Bacon