This year one of my main goals, I’m not doing resolutions, is to cook more at home. I want to make more meals from scratch, learn the techniques and grow my skill set.
I decided to start small and easy with stuffed peppers. I decided to stuff my peppers with rice, chicken, mushrooms and onions and added a side of balsamic spinach and plum tomatoes.
I started by frying diced chicken in a little bit of garlic infused rapeseed oil (by Mackintosh of Glendaveny) and then added in diced red onions and chopped mushrooms. I seasoned this with salt, pepper, extra garlic and some paprika. While this was cooking I cheated slightly and cooked uncle ben’s easy cook rice. Which I didn’t end up seasoning, the downside of taking a rice shortcut. This certainly affected the end result.
For the peppers I used all red and baked these in the oven for about twenty minutes until they had softened just slightly around the edges. Once the chicken and veg was cooked I added in the rice and mixed together. Then added the mix to the peppers and returned to the oven for another 15 minutes with a small sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.
While the peppers were in the oven for the second time I wilted down some spinach and plum tomatoes with a drizzling of balsamic vinegar. As spinach gives off a bit of water while cooking I tried to absorb it by adding in the left over rice and veg.
I served two stuffed peppers with the side of spinach and tomatoes and it was very filling, for me anyway. By the end I couldn’t quite finish as the amount of pepper was getting to me. I think that my oven temperature needed to be a bit higher when cooking the peppers or they may benefit from being done under the grill. The filling was a good mixture but was a plain. I need to work on my seasoning more.
I hadn’t made stuffed peppers in bell peppers before just the long sweet ones and even though this was nice I think I prefer the long ones as a stuffed pepper. I’ll try both again and work on my seasoning. Need to practice but let’s try other things first.