Today I have a quick recipe for you, cooked quickly and written quickly. 😀 It’s the quick peperonata with pre-cooking in the microwave, a recipe I cooked one evening when I had a guest for dinner, specifically a “piada evening”.

For those who are not from Romagna and don’t know what it means for us to say a simple “let’s make piada tonight”, two words to describe it: one, prepare a decent amount of homemade piada (it must be homemade) and two, prepare a series of mixed dishes (the more the better) with which to create multiple, several, mixed fillings for the piadas during dinner.

Excluding purchases made as is, like cheeses (squacquerone, stracchino, caciotta, pecorino) and cold cuts (the inevitable prosciutto but also salami or dry sausage, possibly porchetta), along with the piada, various dishes made of raw and cooked vegetables are also prepared, which each diner will insert into the piadas, more than one, usually in combined pairing.

The raw vegetables used to stuff the piada are usually mixed salad and arugula (together or separate), sometimes sliced tomatoes, often onion (the best is to add it to the salad).

But it’s the cooked vegetables that reign supreme. The cooked vegetables that pair well with piada are many, starting from field herbs, to chard, to green beans, passing through cabbages, all strictly sautéed in a pan with garlic and oil, then reaching the queens of fillings: the gratin vegetables. Mainly tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and onions, but also zucchinis. Some of these recipes are already on the blog, and if you haven’t tried them yet, I recommend you do, 😊 I will leave the links at the end of the introduction.

Another cooked vegetable that in our house is a delicious piada filling – one of my mom’s recipes – is the peperonata. As I already explained in the dedicated recipe (which I called caponata even though we don’t call it that), in our house, it’s called peperonata even though it’s made not only of peppers but also of eggplants. A mystery of our family tradition that I haven’t yet unraveled. 😀

So far, the premise. Then, the evening of the dinner invitation I mentioned.

I had prepared various vegetables but not the peperonata. My daughter noticed its absence and complained, so at the last minute, I decided to correct the error 😀 and to speed things up, I adopted what I believe to be the most useful use of the microwave: pre-cooking.

Pre-cooking in the microwave is now a habit for me, a few years ago I didn’t use it as often as I do now, but when I realized that it speeds up, and well, the cooking times of almost everything I cook… why not use it? 🤷‍♀️ I pre-cook the potatoes before baking them, I pre-cook the carrots before sautéing them in a pan with breadcrumbs, I pre-cook the fennel before gratinating them, I even tried pre-cooking the zucchinis before grilling them, and I’ll tell you it worked great because it allowed me to shorten the cooking time even though I had sliced them thicker than usual.

Ok, I’ve digressed by telling you about all the garden vegetables 😅 but now I’m ready to tell you the recipe for the quick peperonata (in this case only peppers, without eggplants), ready in just 10 minutes thanks to pre-cooking in the microwave. 💪

Are you ready?

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Here are the links to the recipes mentioned above: 👇