Or perhaps this is a better use of the pepper

From Bitten:

Here we have the same old August/September ingredients, but, lordy, what a difference 25 seconds in the food processor can make.

Over gentle heat, cook a minced clove of garlic in olive oil until soft; if it burns throw it out and start again. You could put in half a small chile, like a serrano, too, and you should certainly sprinkle it with salt. As it cooks, cut a big, sweet, ripe red pepper (or two smaller ones) into strips and chop up a big, sweet, ripe, red tomato. Don’t peel either.

Pluck three or four sage leaves from the bunch your friend Frances gave you from her garden. Add the pepper to the cooked garlic, re-salt, raise the heat to medium, and cook for a couple of minutes until it starts to smell divine. Add the tomato and the sage leaves and simmer for, I don’t know, 10 minutes — it will depend on how wet everything is. You don’t need it cooked down too much, but the peppers ought to be tender.

Puree the whole thing in a food processor or a blender; I got a good cup and a half of red-pink sauce that tasted so rich I’d have sworn it had meat stock in it.
Boil some spaghetti, reheat the sauce and serve; this amount of sauce is enough for three main-course servings of pasta. I tried a forkful with grated parmesan, but that was a waste of a cow’s energy. It needed nothing, not even pepper, although I did drizzle some extra olive oil on my portion. Jackie said it was “refined,” not a daily word in our table-talk vocabulary, but let’s just say that if you were served it in a fancy restaurant and they charged you $22 for it you wouldn’t feel cheated.
Refined or not, I take back what I said about that raw tomato thing being the best dish in the world: this is.