Meet Your Farmers

If you haven't been to the Certified Arkansas Farmers Market in the last couple of weeks, you may not have ever met Fred Gray, the Pepper Rancher, from Sparkling River Pepper Company (in the colorful overalls on the right).

Sparking River offers a variety of beautiful sweet and hot peppers. Pesticide-free!

Sparkling River won't be at the market next Saturday, because they are "firing up the smoker" next weekend to replenish their supply of smoked peppers. You'll be able to get some the weekend after next.

I've been preserving some peppers using lacto-fermentation. This is a mixture of sweet and hot peppers. I'm going to make a batch of just sweet peppers today. They'll be great on salads.

Speaking of salads, here's a Greek salad I made using different colored sweet peppers.

If you would like to make a salad like this, I'll tell you what I put in it, but I didn't measure, so you'll have to decide the specifics for yourself.
(I am completely aware that I drive some of my friends and family crazy with my lack of specifics in my recipes. My kitchen craft is more art than science, so please bear with me.)
Ingredients:
Chopped up sweet peppers (green, yellow, orange, red)
diced tomatoes
chopped red onion
kalamata olives (pitted)
feta cheese
Dressing:
about 2 parts olive oil to 1 part vinegar (raw apple cider, balsamic, or red wine) (I used 1/4 cup olive oil and 2 Tbsp. raw apple cider vinegar on this salad. Then I sprinkled it with balsamic vinegar, because it tasted like it needed more.)
a generous amount of fresh or dried oregano. I also added some basil leaves to this one.
salt and pepper
If I'm using fresh herbs, I blend them into the oil and vinegar in my Vitamix. A blender would work too.This salad is better after it has set in the refrigerator overnight and had time to soak in the flavors. We have trouble with this step, as it tends to disappear rather quickly at our house.

Lisa