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 for a “piada night.”

For those who are not from Romagna and don’t know what it means for us to say a simple “tonight we’re making piada”, two words to describe it: one, prepare a fair amount of homemade piada (essential that it’s homemade) and two, prepare a series of mixed courses (the more, the better) with which to compose during dinner multiple, several, mixed fillings for the piadas.

Excluding the 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, several courses composed of raw and cooked vegetables are prepared, which each diner will insert into the piadas, more than one, usually in a combined pairing.

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

But the star is the cooked vegetables. The cooked vegetables that pair well with piada are numerous, starting with field greens, Swiss chard, green beans, moving through cabbages, all rigorously sautéed in a pan with garlic and oil, reaching the queens of fillings: the gratiné vegetables. Mainly tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and onions, but also zucchini. Some of these recipes are already present on the blog, and if you haven’t tried them yet, I recommend doing so, 😊 I’ll 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, we call it, well, peperonata even though it’s made not only of peppers but also of eggplants. A mystery of our family tradition that I haven’t unraveled yet. 😀

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

I had prepared various vegetables but not the peperonata. My daughter noticed its absence and lamented it, so at the last minute, I decided to fix the mistake 😀 and to speed things up, I adopted what I consider the most useful use of the microwave: pre-cooking.

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

Okay, I digressed by talking to 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 the microwave pre-cooking. 💪

Are you ready?

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Here are the links to the above-mentioned recipes: 👇