Summertime Sweet Red Pepper Sauce – Mojo Rojo

This week I finally got back into my own kitchen after our extended trip abroad. I missed our routines around breakfast: my morning pot of fresh brewed coffee on the table, lunch – being creative with leftovers, and dinner – the pleasure of chopping onions using my own sharp santuko knife.

One of the things I realised very quickly was that I didn’t miss the bi-weekly grind of having to go to the store for groceries, although I’m very happy wandering open air markets to find fruits and vegetables, freshly baked breads or preserves. So I made a resolution before we came home, to order online for all our essentials and dried goods, and visit a market once a week for everything else.

So far so good. Our first order from Peapod arrived on Friday night (see Zen Toolkit below,) and despite being a little late it was great to wake up on Saturday morning knowing that the cupboards were full and fresh milk was waiting in the fridge.

As for the market, we made it to the Green City Market Fulton and chose some perfectly ripe, long sweet red peppers before returning to our own garden and picking green bell peppers and hot jalapenos. The Mojo Rojo and Mojo Verde sauces are made using the red (rojo) and the green (verde) peppers, which I quickly blended in a food processor with a handful of other ingredients. I cook the Mojo Rojo with chicken and use the Mojo Verde on pork.

These two sauces are versatile and can be eaten without cooking, but using them this way in your slow cooker is an easy way to cook your meat in a seasonal homemade sauce.

Ideas for sides to add are steamed sweet corn with a sprinkling of sea salt and cumin, arugula and parsley salad with a squeeze of lemon and sea salt, crispy cubes of potato to soak up the sauce – reticent of Spanish Patatas Bravas.

Prep Time 10 minutes Cooking Time 5-6 hours LOW Servings 4 – 6

Ingredients

2 sweet red peppers, deseeded and roughly chopped
1 hot red pepper * optional
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sweet smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 – 2 lbs chicken thighs, boneless and skinless
black pepper

Put the peppers, garlic, red wine vinegar, salt, smoked paprika, cumin and olive oil into a food processor and blend until almost smooth.

Arrange the chicken thighs in the bottom of your slow cooker, season with freshly ground black pepper and pour the pepper mixture over the top. Cover and cook on LOW for 5-6 hours.

Alternative Mojo Verde sauce – substitute the chicken for pork, red peppers for green, hot red pepper for hot green, smoked paprika for oregano and add a bunch of cilantro to the remaining ingredients. Prepare in the same way as above.

Zen Toolkit

I chose Peapod because it’s so easy to use and they source good organic, free range and grass fed meats. I can build my order in my own time and return to it when I want, plus I can update my order once processed provided it’s within my order cut off time. So, if we run out of Cheerios at the last minute I can tag them on. Delivery times are flexible to within a 2 hour window.

Shopping this way also feels less wasteful, since going to the store I’m always tempted to impulse purchase.

Zen Moment

“Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours–long hallways and unforeseen stairwells–eventually puts you in the place you are now.”
― Ann Patchett, What now?