Cafe Liz

Tomato salad with purple onion and pepper

Purple food week continues: This is the sister dish to yesterday’s post. Another simple, easy-to-make salad, this time with tomatoes and red-hot — or should I say purple-hot — pepper from the ornamental pepper plant outside our kitchen window.

As I’ve stated (every day this week), I declared this week purple food week after buying a surplus of strangely colored food at the Tel Aviv port farmer’s market last Friday. Admittedly, a purple pepper growing outside my window does not really fall into the category of I-have-too-much-food-and-I-have-to-use-it-before-it-goes-bad, but it is awfully pretty, and it’s purple, too.

The plant itself is an ornamental pepper plant, and is a relative of the Thai ornamental pepper plant. The peppers are indeed edible, and are supposedly less spicy than their Thai cousins. The peppers start out white, then turn purple, then orange, and finally red, which signifies ripeness — meaning the pepper has reached its full spicy potential.

With that in mind, let’s just say that this unripe purple pepper wasn’t exactly mild. But it was so pretty, I couldn’t help but add the entire thing into our little salad.

For a small side dish for two:

3 tomatoes
1/4 lemon, juiced
1 T olive oil
1 very small purple pepper (or 2 cm of another kind of hot pepper — this makes a very spicy dish!)
a 1/2 cm slice of a big purple onion (or half a very small onion)
1/2 a garlic clove
1 t cilantro
salt

Dice tomatoes and onion, and finely chop garlic and pepper. Mix all the ingredients together. Once the garlic and the hot pepper hits the liquids accumulating in the bowl, their flavor will spread quickly.

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