Home Cooking: Stuffed Peppers

The moment I saw our trio of bell peppers from our Kula Fields subscription box, I knew that I wanted to make stuffed peppers.  Although I had never made them before, they seemed easy enough.  I sieved through many stuffed pepper pins on Pinterest, before I finally just googled the almighty cooking god Mark Bittman + stuffed peppers.

Google found me his simple recipe on nytimes.com as well as a blogger attempt of stuffed peppers cribbed from Mark Bittman's recipes in How to Cook Everything.

{my trio of stuffed bell peppers baked with extra stuffing}

I took a little dash here and there from the two recipes to make my own stuffed pepper recipe.

• large bell peppers: cut the tops off, reserve the caps, scoop out the insides, salt and pepper the cavities
• 1 large yellow onion, chopped
• 4 large cloves of garlic, minced
• fresh sweet corn (I used one ear from our Kula Fields box and just sliced the corn kernels away from the cob)
• 2 tablespoons butter
• salt and black pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup black Forbidden Rice
• ground cumin
• smoked cayenne pepper
• fresh parsley and thyme from the container garden
• 3/4 pound ground beef
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Over medium high heat, melt butter in a medium sized saute pan.  Add the chopped onion, season with salt and pepper, and cook until soft.  Add the minced garlic, the rice and spices and cook until the rice is glossy (about 1 minute).  Add 1/2 cup of water and the corn, cover the pan and cook until the water is absorbed (about 15 minutes) on low heat.

While the rice mixture cooks, put the ground beef into a large mixing bowl, season with salt and pepper and add the fresh herbs before mixing.

When the rice mixture is done cooking, add it to the beef and combine the ingredients well.  Stuff the peppers, replace the caps on top and place them into a small baking dish.  

Since I had extra stuffing, I loaded the rest of it into the pan, which served as extra padding around the peppers to keep them upright as they baked.

Pour the chicken stock into the pan with a 1/4 cup of olive oil and cook for 30 to 40 minutes.

The hardest part of the dish is waiting for the peppers to cool once they are out of the oven!

{new reading material}

Right now, I'm working through my last library book in my stack before reading my new Kindle book, The Shining Girls in earnest.  You gotta love lazy afternoons before work.