Stuffed Peppers

I cooked again! And I'm posting the recipe here mostly for my own future reference. Because it was relatively simple, pretty cheap, quite healthy, and easy enough to alter depending on my mood. Not to mention that it actually resulted in leftovers. I've been eating stuffed peppers all week long.

The first thing to do is cook the rice. The recipe told me I should have 1 cup of cooked rice per pepper. I missed the word "cooked" and ended up with roughly twice as much rice as I needed. But that's okay because rice is cheap and it made the leftovers last longer.

While the rice was cooking, I chopped up an onion and some mushrooms and sauteed them with garlic. Then I chopped up some tomatoes and shredded a bunch of Parmesan cheese. You can add anything else you want to the stuffing. I may try putting in some nuts next time. Or throwing some chicken or beef in with the onions and garlic.

Mushrooms and onions

Tomatoes and cheese

I also prepared the peppers at this point. This is pretty easy. Cut off the top, just like a pumpkin, and remove all the seeds. Give them a good rinse to make sure you get all of the seeds out.

Cleaned peppers

When the rice is done, throw it in a bowl with all of your veggies and mix it all up.

Stuffing!

At this point, you can either throw everything in the fridge to be cooked later, or you can proceed. The most appealing part of this recipe to me is that you can get all of the heavy lifting out of the way hours before the food actually needs to be cooked.

When you're ready to go, spoon the rice stuffing into the peppers. Push it down to get all of the air out. Then stick the peppers into the dish you'll use to bake them (I actually used a pot. It worked. But I'll probably buy some corning ware in the nearish future). Once the peppers have all been stuffed, dump the extra rice mixture into the pot around them. You can definitely tell that I made way too much rice.

Stuffed peppers, plus all the extra stuffing. I think there was more rice around the peppers than in them

Now throw a bunch of mozzarella cheese on top (if you want) and grind some pepper on, too.

mmmm, cheese

Bake at 375 for 10 minutes per pepper (so I baked this for 40 minutes).

Then serve! This is so much more food than it looks like. I ate about half of what I put on my plate.

A deceptively filling meal

These keep pretty well in the fridge and heat up nicely in the microwave. Next time, I think I'll want to add some protein to the stuffing so that I don't have to worry about that part of the meal during the leftover phase. I'll also remember to use less rice.