Onepot ‘cacciatore’ salutes latesummer peppers

I wouldn’t blame anyone who, at this point in this unforgiving year, just started eating sandwiches and popcorn for dinner. Between the pandemic, home schooling, heat waves, fires and the apocalyptic skies that accompany them, not to mention the impending election, opting out of proper mealtime altogether seems a sensible reaction.

And yet. Despite everything that feels not right, there are things we can still count on, touchstones amid the topsyturvy. Mother nature, ravaged though she may be, still delivers: At the farmers’ markets, the tables are piled with taut purple eggplants, shelling beans and thinskinned peppers. I don’t even care much about peppers, but these latesummer market specimens are special, as similar in taste to a hothouse green pepper as January tomatoes are to the real fieldripened McCoy.

With so little under our control, there’s reassurance in watching how heat, when applied to these peppers, renders them silky and soft, peace to be found in a onepot meal that can be served with pasta, or polenta, or rice or with nothing more than a hunk of bread.

This recipe is, of course, a cacciatore of sorts, but cacciatore, which translates as “hunter’s style,” has as many variations as there are cooks who make it. There are recipes that use rabbit or pheasant instead of chicken (more hunterlike, but it’s not as easy for an American home cook to score a rabbit or bag a pheasant) and some that include mushrooms and wine; Italian American versions often include marinara.

And so, I’ve taken my liberties here, making a sort of cacciatoremeets pepper on ata. I use sweet peppers and a few jarred hot Calabrian chiles, onions and black olives, and a glug of red wine vinegar to counteract the inherent sweetness of cooked peppers. There’s tomato paste in there, but no marinara, and just enough chicken stock to aid in the braising of the chicken.

You can make it in under an hour, if you’re committed to the task, and any leftovers are especially good, particularly if you shred the meat and stir it into the sauce. That way, if you don’t feel like cooking tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, you’ll still have something waiting for you, a recipe as durable as the cook who made it.

Jessica Battilana This onepot dish, a sort of cacciatoremeetspepperonata — is easy to make and brimming with chicken and latesummer’s special sweet peppers.