Stuffed peppers

So the blog ground to a halt, arrested, cut short, brought to a standstill. And while Andrew has the excellent excuse of having recently moved house, I have no excuse at all. It’s not like I stopped cooking, baking, making... and I even took plenty of foody photos along the way. Once the sneaky lag in writing steps in it’s hard to overcome. Soooo. Tonight I prepared myself, did all my procrastinating early in the evening, and now am tucked up in my dressing gown, with a bedtime drink and am bringing the blog back to life.

And I do have lots of new recipes I’ve been trying out that I’d love to share.

I’ve made this stuffed peppers recipe a few times now and it’s one of the best vegan meals I’ve ever eaten. I recently had to cater for a mix of people including: veggie, reluctant to eat a meal with no meat, dairy intolerant and gluten intolerant and this turned out to be quite a winner. No leftovers.

It’s not a very quick dinner to prepare, but it’s really not difficult to get right. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Ingredients

• 8-10 sweet peppers
• olive oil for frying
• 1 onion, diced
  
• 2 garlic cloves, finely sliced or crushed
• 175g mushrooms, sliced
• 250g rice
• 90g red lentils
• 450ml vegetable stock
• 60g pine nuts
• several generous sprigs of fresh parsley, finely chopped

Basic cooking steps





Heat a little oil in a large pan and gently cook the onion, garlic and mushrooms until soft

(I've also used shallots in place of onions which turned out pretty good)









Add the rice and lentils and a little extra oil and stir


Pour in stock and season with salt and pepper

Bring to the boil and simmer gently until the rice is cooked. Add a little more water if required. This will take around 15 minutes but will depend on the type of rice you decide to use









While the stuffing cooks, prepare the peppers: carefully cut the tops off and keep to one side, rinse out the cores and seeds

Preheat the oven to 180°C









Stir in the pine nuts and parsley and check for taste - if you like it a little spicier, add a dash of cayenne pepper










Divide the stuffing between the peppers (depending on the size of the peppers you may have a little stuffing left over...but this is pretty yummy to eat just as it is!)

Stand the peppers upright in a casserole dish and place the tops back on

Pour a little cold water into the bottom of the dish and bake for 30-40 minutes until peppers are nicely tender




Serve with a green veg. Peas work well!