Thursday Recipe - Roasted Chilies and Chili Rellenos Wraps

We just started participating in Bountiful Baskets. It's a food co-op. They explain it all nicely on the site. You put in your order on Monday, pick it up on Saturday. Fresh produce for you, money for the small farmers, everyone wins. The only problem we have is also a benefit - you never know what's going to show up in your basket.

The last two weeks we've gotten these:

Lovely Anaheim chili peppers. I've never really used fresh peppers besides bell peppers and I'm not a huge fan of those. The first week I got these, I just stared at them for a while wondering what to do with them. I'd seen a FoodNetwork show where they roasted them. Roasted peppers sounded good, and if I got real ambitious, we could have chili rellenos for dinner, right? Umm, maybe.

We have been enjoying having a propane BBQ for the last month, courtesy of the contractor rebuilding our kitchen. It's a long story. Let's just say, I'm a fan. I want one of my own now. My only experience before was with a stupid little tabletop grill that might warm up a slice of cheese if you waited an hour. I've cooked in dutch ovens and over fires, but that's a messy proposition.

These are about halfway done.

Back to the peppers. I roasted them in the BBQ, but didn't do it long enough. I was paranoid about burning them. Roasting them longer makes them easier to peel. You WANT the skin to turn mostly black.

After roasting them, set them aside in a metal bowl loosely covered with a big plate or giant plastic bag. Let them steam and cool down for an hour or so. Then, peel off the skin and discard it.

Slit the peppers open and pull out the seeds. I also cut off the stems at this point. You will be left with a slimy, green slab of deliciousness. These peppers are a little bit spicy, a lot like the canned green chilies you can buy but much more delicious.

Yeah, it looks like a mess, but it tastes so good.

Here's my take on chili rellenos wraps. My kids gobbled these up.

Take one pepper. Smear it with a bit of cream cheese. Add in a few hunks of really old cheddar cheese (scrape off the mold first). Roll the pepper up. Set it on a ginormous tortilla (also from Bountiful Baskets), fold and roll it like an eggroll - fold 1/3 over the pepper, fold in the sides, roll it up. Microwave for 1 minute if you have a real microwave, 3 minutes if you use an old 300 watt beauty like ours used to be before we bought the new, powerful, lovely one above our stove. Enjoy.

You can add fresh salsa if you want, but I thought these were very tasty on their own.