Man Love

I don't say this lightly because somewhere this will end up in cyberspace and I'll start receiving emails from weird web sites, but I've got a great big case of man love right now. It started innocently enough with a talk about the veggie garden and progressed to a discussion about growing peppers. I didn't plant any peppers (hot or sweet) this year because I just couldn't get around to more digging after all the work we did on the outside of the house this year. Peppers are one of my favorite foods. I haven't had a lot of success growing peppers because they don't do well in wet soil, which I have here, and they need plenty of sunshine, which I don't have here (still too many trees).

So I was discussing peppers with my buddie Dave and he was telling me about his success over the years growing peppers. Fran (Dave's wife) then mentioned what a great job he did making stuffed peppers. You've got to understand here, I never pictured Dave in the kitchen cooking. Dave is a great yard guy, spending untold hours landscaping and gardening, and it shows because he has a great yard. I don't do yard, unless I absolutely must, so I'm always impressed by the things he's done out there. This is not where the man love comes in to play. It's all about the peppers. Apparently one of the few things Dave cooks is stuffed peppers. When I married the love of my life, her first job was on the other side of town while mine was one block away. Since I was home first, I usually started dinner. Stuffed peppers were one of the first things I learned how to cook. They were fairly easy to do and very tasty, tough to mess up because if you overcooked them, they were just more tender. I didn't realize then, but I do now, that Nancy is not a big pepper fan. She will deny this, but the telltale sign is that she always picks them out of the food and shuffles them to the side. I'm ok with that, you like what you like. I stopped making stuffed peppers years ago mostly because of this. I know, I could still make them and just enjoy them myself, but one of the reasons I like to cook is to see the appreciation other people experience when they've had a good meal.

This weekend after a night time cruise around the lake, we returned to the house for a fire in the pit. On their way in, Fran placed a package in the refrigerator. It was a container with a stuffed pepper and lots of great looking sauce. Dave had cooked that afternoon. He gave me the aw shucks and described how the sauce was a little thin and might be a little tart. This reminded me of the sauce I cooked last year with fresh tomatoes that was so tart I might as well have sucked a lemon. I thanked Dave and there it sat in the fridge until today's lunch time. I poured it into a bowl and there it was, a beauty. The sauce was a nice marinara, with lots of cut up tomatoes, onions and artichokes (!!!I can here Sarah already; ARTICHOKES!!!!). It was the perfect stuffed pepper and just instantly reminded me of the early days of my cooking. Bon!

So here it is Dave. A little man love for you today.