Roasted Pepper and Goat Cheese Crostini

Start with the peppers. At the height of summer, you will find them at the market in impossible colors: deep crimson, sunset orange, butter yellow. They should feel heavy for their size and smell faintly sweet even through the skin. That is ripeness. That is what you are looking for.

Roasting peppers over an open flame is one of the oldest kitchen techniques, and one of the simplest. The fire blisters the skin and concentrates the sugars inside. You end up with something silky, smoky, and deeply sweet. It takes almost no effort if the ingredient is right.

The goat cheese here should come from someone you can name, or at least a region you recognize. Good chèvre has a bright tang that cuts through the sweetness of the peppers. Together on warm, garlicky bread, they become something greater than their parts. This is the kind of appetizer I would set out at Chez Panisse, food that tastes like a specific place and moment in time.

Every meal is a meaningful choice. These crostini are proof that perfect ingredients need almost nothing done to them.