AH-HA! Now I’m Cooking With Broadband

First of all, if this recipe were a paper for school, it’d be considered plagiarism. I “stole” it from Umbria In, because it’s a traditional Umbrian dish, modified Elly-style. Because of my lack of modern conveniences, I’ll put up how I did it, with notations on how it probably should be done.

This recipe should be delicious even to those who are not fans of peppers. I’m not exactly sure why, but it ends up tasting quite meaty.

Another ingredient here I’m not sure is available in the states is cooking cream. It’s this horribly disgusting stuff that’s about the consistency of…between pudding and flan. If you can’t get it, use normal cream, and be aware that your concoction is going to be a bit more liquidy than mine at that last stage (because you’ll have to have used considerably more cream), so you may have to alter the length of cooking or…something.

• 2 bell peppers, I recommend 1 red, 1 yellow, because I don’t like green, but also the original recipe recommends against green as well, so I’m persuaded to think that maybe they wouldn’t go well with this recipe.
• 1 small onion, sliced
• Garlic cloves to taste [how it should be done] or garlic powder [how I did it]
• Salt to taste
• Olive oil
• Water
• A generous slice of butter
• Cooking cream
• 1-2 tablespoons of tomato pureé, or (less) tomato paste, to taste
• Black pepper
• Oregano
• Grated parmesan, asiago, romano, or pecorino cheese
• Any amount of pasta. I recommend fusilli, bowtie, or shell pasta: these will capture the sauce like spaghetti, linguini, or fettucini won’t. I also don’t recommend filled pasta.

[what you should do] Cut the peppers into 4-5 slices lengthwise, gut as per usual, and roast. After roasting sufficiently, remove the skins. Then, cut the slices into more manageable sizes (about 1″x2″).
[what I did] Cut the peppers into 8 slices lengthwise and then in half height-wise.
Heat a nice puddle of olive oil over high heat in a skillet-type pan deep enough to drown the vegetables in. Toss in the peppers, onion, garlic cloves and salt and cook until softened. Then, add water enough to the pan to make it look like vegetable cereal: not quite covered, but almost. Allow to boil; cook that way, uncovered, stirring occasionaly, adding water as necessary, until the vegetables are soft enough to mash with a fork or potato masher, about 20 minutes.
[what you should do] At this point, after the majority of the water cooks off, take the slime and put it in a blender, along with the tomato pureé/paste. Blend until it’s a proper pureé.
[what I did] mash them all up, with the tomato pureé/paste, with a fork till your hand goes numb and you have a permanent impression of a fork on your palm and fingers, and you still have a chunky goopy thing >_< Yummy though.
In the pan: put in your slice of butter and allow to melt. Add a good amount of the cooking cream (pretty much to taste; we’re trying to make a cream sauce, so enough to make it all creamy). Then add your vegetable goo. Mix it all up till it’s all uniform, then add your spices and cheese to taste. Allow to thicken and cook down.
At this point, it’s ready: it’s also very, very rich and heavy, so one may desire to dilute with water. If you do choose to dilute it, it will make a much larger amount of sauce. If you aren’t planning on using it all at once, I’d recommend storing the concentrate and diluting only what you’ll need that meal; it’ll keep better that way and be less cumbersome. Also, and this is very important: the texture and flavour won’t be right unless you allow it to get to this point of thickness before diluting it. Be patient!
Having already boiled pasta (you remembered to do that, right?) al dente, you cretins, you may now serve and top with your delicious sauce and, if you so desire, more grated cheese (the kind you already used, or mozzarella, either one )

I love italy XD