Culinary Disasters

This post marks a new era for me in that I have finally joined the Digital SLR revolution (revolution will be televised across living rooms and the great divide).  Went with the Nikon D60 and mucho thanks to my buddy Richard for his patience as I ask a ton of questions/sending him test photos.  This also marks a new frustration for Jeff in that I feel it is my goal to get the most bang for my buck so my library hold limit is maxed with Digital SLR books and my nights are spent reading about aperture/ISO/etc.

There will still be a few more posts flipping through that will be done with my old point and shoot but I had to get this one up and open for critiscm.

Stuffed peppers are one of my favorite things to do with the leftover peppers from the garden. Normally I hate buying them at the grocery store because non-season the conventional peppers are a good 2-3 dollars each (organic prices make me cry when I see them on bell peppers).  Imagine my surprise when wandering through the co-op and I find red bell peppers on sale for a dollar a pound.  Most of the red bell peppers I bought just got chopped up and drug into work for snacking.  I did manage to keep two behind and then found another deal on green peppers so bought two of them for stuffing.

Stuffing bell peppers is like pouch cooking fish or chicken.  Everyone can have their own little bell pepper of joy with the ingredients they want in it.  I kept mine all the same and went on another adventure in fridge cleaning to make these peppers.

The tomatoes I used were romas leftover from salad making and I decided to roast them.  Roasting tomatoes is pretty simple and all I do is preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Slice the top off of the tomatoes and using your knife make an X on the bottom of the tomato (the X makes peeling off the skin a lot easier).  Toss the tomatoes with thyme, olive oil, crushed red pepper, salt, pepper, shallots, and garlic.  Place them in an ovenproof pan cut side down and put in the oven till the tomatoes are soft (about 30 minutes).  After they are done chop them up and then run them through a colander to get rid of excess liquid.

If you don’t want to go through the effort of roasting tomatoes a regular can of diced tomatoes would be awesome.  Just make sure you drain it.

For this recipe you will need:

• 1 lb of ground pork sausage
• 1 onion finely diced
• 3 cloves of garlic finely diced
• 4 roasted roma tomatoes chopped and drained or 1 small can of tomatoes drained
• 1 box of frozen spinach or 1 bunch of spinach that has been blanched (dumped in boiling water for about 30 and then tossed in ice water to stop the cooking), and chopped up.  Make sure to squeeze all the excess liquid out of the spinach.
• 1 cup of your favorite cheese (I used queso asadero that I grabbed from the Mexican bakery)
• teaspoon of Hot Hungarian paprika
• teaspoon of dried Greek oregano
• heavy pinch of crushed red pepper
• kosher salt and black pepper
• high temperature oil (I used canola)
• enough bread crumbs to top each of the peppers
• enough parmigiano-reggiano cheese to grate over the top of the peppers

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.  While the oven is preheating over medium-high add a squirt of oil, sausage, and a good pinch of salt and pepper.  Let this brown and then remove the sausage from the pan and set aside.

Add in the onions with another pinch of salt and pepper and cook till softened (about 5 minutes).  Add in the garlic and paprika and cook till fragrant (about 30 seconds.  Remove and set aside.

In a large bowl add the tomatoes, sausage, onion mixture, spinach, cheese, oregano, and crushed red pepper.  Combine everything, taste, and adjust.  In the words of Emeril this is not rocket science people.  If it is not spicy enough add more crushed red pepper, needs salt add salt, needs…well you get the picture I hope.

Remove the top of each of the peppers, dump the seeds, and trim the inner veins inside the pepper.   Shove as much of the mixture as possible into each of the peppers.  Top the peppers with bread crumbs and parmigiano-reggiano cheese.

Shove in the oven and cook till the pepper has softened (about 30 minutes).  Now we are left with a perfectly cooked pepper but none of that beautiful browning of the cheese and breadcrumbs.  Easy way to solve this problem is turn your broiler to high and shove the peppers under that for a couple minutes.  There is a fine line between perfectly browned and burnt to a crisp so don’t stray to far from the kitchen.

Serve and enjoy!

Tags: pork, All //