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

For those who are not from Romagna and don’t know what it means for us to say simply “tonight we’re making piada”, a few words to describe it: one, prepare a good quantity of homemade piada (it’s crucial that it’s homemade) and two, prepare a series of mixed dishes (the more, the better) with which to make multiple, numerous, mixed fillings for the piadas during the dinner.

Excluding purchases that are served 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, we also prepare various dishes made of raw and cooked vegetables, which each diner will insert into the piadas, more than one, usually in combined combinations.

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

But the cooked vegetables are the star. The cooked vegetables that pair well with piada are numerous, from country herbs to chard to green beans, passing through cabbages, all strictly sautéed in a pan with garlic and oil, up to the queens of fillings: gratinated vegetables. Mainly tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and onions, but also zucchini. Some of these recipes are already present here on the blog and if you haven’t tried them yet, I recommend you do so, 😊 I will leave the links at the end of the introduction.

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

Here’s the premise so far. Then the evening of the dinner invitation as mentioned.

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

The microwave pre-cooking has become a habit for me; until a few years ago, I didn’t use it as often as 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 the potatoes before baking them, pre-cook the carrots before sautéing them in a pan with breadcrumbs, pre-cook the fennel before gratinating them, I have also tried pre-cooking the zucchini before grilling them and I will tell you, it worked great because it allowed me to shorten the cooking time even though I sliced them thicker than usual.

Ok, I digressed talking about all the garden vegetables 😂 but now I’m ready to tell you the recipe for the quick pepperonata (in this case with just peppers, no eggplants), ready in just 10 minutes thanks to microwave pre-cooking. 💪

Are you ready?

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Here are the links to the recipes mentioned above: 👇