This is the final chapter in my stoplight pepper condiment trilogy. :-)
I started with red pepper harissa, and then made a spicy lemon-garlic yellow-pepper sauce, and now this one.
For the base of this creamy sauce, I roasted two green bell peppers and two mid-sized poblanos.
From there, with the way that harissa is made in the back of my head, I started picking out elements that would go well and maintain color clarity. I thought an avocado would make it creamy and fatty, and I used fresh (non-roasted) jalapeno peppers for contrast. And fresh herbs made sense instead of dried spices. And the lime seemed like it would go well with the other flavors. The leftmost of the herbs is a big hank of mint stalk. We grew a bunch of mint this summer, but it's frozen hard a few times and the plant is dead and drying. I cut this from our front porch and stripped off the leaves that looked like they were in good shape. Then I cut the heavy stems off a wad of flat-leaf parsley and a bigger wad of cilantro, and added the leaves from those. In the lower right you can see some trimmings from three of the basils that are currently growing in our AeroGarden.
I basically just put them all together and blended them thoroughly.
It took a long time to get sufficiently blended down, and I stopped and added some salt and Muntok pepper along the way, but I ended up with a pretty nice final result. I was a little worried that it would be too close to a guacamole (not that I don't love guac, but I was looking for something different) but by blending the hell out of it, it lost all the texture that would be reminiscent of that.
Now that my sauces are all done, I'll have to use them! Stay tuned to see them on a plate!
