I made the mistake of growing 6 plants of that kind of pepper! They are beautiful, but bitter! Would love to hear some good ways to use them! FYI they turn green when cooked!

what about pickling them with a very sugary brine?

They're very similar to green bell peppers (I made this mistake before too) so any recipe that call for green peppers should work. Maybe roasting them would be good, as it would bring out the sugars and dull the bitter compounds.

If you roast the peppers, they do turn an unappealing color. I don't remember what it did for the flavor, though.

There's bitter, and then there's BITTER.

If I'm remembering correctly, the purple pepper varieties are purple when unripe, just like green peppers. That means the flavor will be slightly bitter like green peppers too. Not a big deal, unless you really hate bitter flavors.

There's been a deep drought across a lot of the US tho. This can really affect the flavor of fruits and vegetables, and a veggie that normally you love might taste horribly bitter no matter what you do. Sometimes I've salvaged drought vegetables by making them into quick pickles, but often they are just inedible.

Maybe it would be best to just decorate with them? They are lovely!

Yes, they are a tad bit more bitter than their brightly colored cousins. They work well in fresh salads but if they're a bit too bitter for your taste, just freeze them for later use in soups, stews & the like. Use wherever a bell pepper is called for. No noticeable difference once they are cooked. Since you have a bounty, you might try stuffed, roasted peppers with a few fresh ones. As mentioned above, they are quite sweet when roasted. Alternatively, you could ship them all to me.

Enjoy!

I don't normally care for green peppers, but there's a great Bulgarian recipe where I absolutely love green peppers, and I imagine it would work well for these bitter babies... (this recipe is NOT as good with red or yellow peppers - they're too sweet and not bitter enough)

(from an old German cookbook called Spezialitäten der Welt, published by GU, inherited from my MIL)

the Bulgarian name is given as "Tschuschki sis sirene"

(recipe says filling is for 4 peppers but we often do a bunch of smaller peppers and the filling is enough for the irregular-sized ones we get from the CSA)

roast and peel your peppers, leaving the stem on and slitting one side to remove the seeds/ribs.
make the filling by mashing together:
150 g feta or bulgarian sheep cheese
1 egg
"some" sour cream or crème fraîche

the recipe says "the mixture should be creamy and not too thick" - our mixture comes out something like slightly chunky stirred yoghurt

put the peppers in an oiled baking dish, then fill the peppers with the mixture (they form kind of flattened cups with the filling inside, that's why you have to be a bit careful when you slit them open), drizzle them with some olive oil (book says 4 T but we use less), and bake in a 180° C oven for 40 minutes or until lightly browned on top.

eat with fresh white bread (living in France as we do, we eat it with baguette...)

it's simple but really delicious. the leftovers are also excellent, if there are ever any left!

to make it go faster, we often roast and prep the peppers on a bbq one night, then keep them in the fridge and fill them another night for dinner, because the entire process start to finish is not suitable for weeknights.

As others have said, they work well in recipes which call for green peppers. I've made stuffed peppers with them that turned out well.

Sadly, they lose their beautiful color and turn light green when cooked.