Photo credit: Peter Lyons Hall
By Peter Lyons Hall
If you’re browsing the vendors at the Lakeside Farmers Market this season, keep an eye out for a colorful newcomer: the lunchbox pepper, Capsicum annuum. These petite sweet peppers — usually sold as a mix of red, orange, and yellow — are bred specifically for snacking, and they’re arriving at market tables right as families gear up for the school year.
Each pepper measures just two to three inches long, small enough to toss whole into a lunchbox without slicing or seeding. Unlike their heat-packing cousins, lunchbox peppers are prized for their sweetness and crunch, with thin walls and very few seeds, making them easy to eat straight out of hand. That combination of size, sweetness, and low-mess eating is exactly what makes them such a natural fit for kids’ lunches, after-school snacking, or quick hors d’oeuvres at a late-summer gathering.
Locally, these peppers are grown by Jeff Bialas of J&A Farm in Goshen, who brings them to Greenwood Lake each week for the Lakeside Farmers Market. Shoppers can find them Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Windermere Avenue, across from Chase Bank.
Beyond raw snacking, lunchbox peppers hold up well in salads, stir-fries, and pasta dishes, and they take on a silkier, deeper sweetness when roasted or sautéed — useful for dips, spreads, or sandwiches as the weather starts to cool.
Timing-wise, the peppers make sense for early fall. Most varieties reach their colorful ripe stage roughly 80 days after seeding, lining up with a harvest window that stretches from late summer into early fall, just as the market pivots toward the first cool-weather crops.
For shoppers at Lakeside, they’re an easy way to add color and nutrition to the week ahead — and a good reason to stop by Jeff’s stand on Windermere Avenue this Saturday.
