Stuffed peppers, adapted.....and TGIF

This is so very exciting. I actually have a recipe to share! Or at least the makings of a recipe! Or at least the idea for what could be a really great recipe!

I’ve had the hankering for a while to make stuffed peppers. A fall-esque, comfort food meal that the weather and life have been screaming out for. With these desires in mind, I happened upon this recipe from The Pioneer Woman, and was struck the idea to make stuffed peppers using the sauce and pineapple combination in her recipe. Genius, right?!?

What I did:

• Made some rice (1 cup uncooked).
• Put a large pot of water to boil and cleaned out 4 medium sized green peppers.



• Cut up ½ an onion.
• Put the green peppers in the boiling water and let them boil for about 5 minutes.
• Removed the peppers and stood them up in a small glass pan.
• Preheated the oven to 350.
• Cooked the onion and a clove of garlic in some olive oil until the onions were translucent.
• Chopped the pineapple from a can into smaller pieces and put them in the pan with the onion.
• Put a drained can of diced tomatoes in the same pan and let it all cook for a few minutes while I put together the sauce from the The Pioneer Woman’s recipe (I halved her recipe, and I also used veggie broth instead of beef broth).
• Poured the sauce in with the pineapples, tomatoes and onion and let cook until the sauce had thickened up a good bit.

• Once the sauce was thickened, combined the whole mixture with the rice, and then spooned it into the waiting peppers.

• Popped it in the oven for about 25 minutes so that everything warms through.

Overall, this was pretty good – although not as good as I was hoping. I think I will try this again, but with a few modifications. In my opinion, the sauce needs the beef broth for richness – the veggie broth just didn’t quite cut it. I would also probably add a little more sugar (that blasted sweet tooth), and some of the juice from the can of tomatoes. The other thing this dish is missing is some protein – perhaps it could be made with quinoa instead of rice? It would also be good with some ground beef or tenderloin tips…..yum.

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And with that – it’s Friday, and I’m so very glad it is! I’m looking forward to a very autumnal weekend, with a visit from an old friend and playing tourist in my own city. I might even try to bake on Sunday, and who knows, maybe I’ll have another semblance of a recipe to pass along!

  

Happy weekend!