After working freelance on site for a few days and then enjoying our vacation, I'm finally able to get back in the test kitchen. Every week, my mom sends me cooking e-newsletters from a few different sites like Eating Well, McCormicks and Recipe Zaar. This week's meal came from the third one offering up Ground Beef Stuffed Green Bell Peppers With Cheese.
The last stuffed peppers I enjoyed were cooked by Matt's father. He used a combination of pork, beef and ground veal for the stuffing and cooked them in a large pot of tomato sauce for hours. They were really good, having steeped in the flavors all day long, but what always struck me funny was that no one in Matt's family ever ate the pepper. As we sat down at the table everyone sliced off the pepper, dumped out the meat filling on their plates and tossed the pepper aside.
"We never eat the pepper." said Matt
"Why not?" I wondered
"We just don't."
That explains everything.
Could it be possible that after hours of cooking all the flavor had been zapped from the pepper and the best part of the meal was in fact the savory filling? Perhaps the rationale was just to get straight to best part of the dish and let nothing stand in the way. I can respect that.
When I told Matt that this week, Dad and I were going to try a different stuffed pepper recipe, he said:
"Ok, but I'm still not going to eat the pepper."
"We'll see."
Even though I wasn't booked to work any on-site assignments this week, I still had home office clients to attend to with a promised deadline of Wednesday. Dad had called the night before and needed to drop Mom's car off for service at the garage down the street from house. His plan was to walk up the hill and then I could give him a ride back to the his house. We he arrived, we decided to go to the grocery store early, cook in the morning and then I would have the rest of the afternoon free for work. The peppers could be easily stored in a dish and wrapped up to be popped in the oven for dinner later on.
As always, we added a few tweaks to the recipe. Mom had been on a zucchini bread baking kick the week before and still had a little bit shredded, left over from the recipe. We decided to add that to the meat mixture for added bulk and fiber. Even though there is already a little shredded cheddar in the recipe mixed in with the filling, we decided to kick it up and procured a 1/4 pound of thin sliced provolone from the deli counter. One slice would top each of the peppers in the final minutes of baking.
Beef & Cheese Stuffed Peppers
Ingredients:
6 large green or multi-colored peppers
1 pound lean ground beef
1/2 cup onion, chopped
1 (16 oz) can of diced tomatoes, low salt
1/4 cup of shredded zucchini
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 cup long grain rice, uncooked
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of black pepper
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup of reduced-fat Mexican shredded cheese
6 thin slices of provolone cheese
Steps:
1. Cut tops from the peppers, discarding seeds and membranes.
2. Dice up pieces from the tops so you have about 1/4 cup of peppers and set aside.
3. Cook the whole peppers in a large pot of boiling water for 5 minutes. Remove from water with tongs, invert to drain and set aside to cool.
4. Sprinkle inside of peppers lightly with salt.
5. In a skillet, cook ground beef, onion and the 1/4 cup chopped pepper until meat is browned and veggies are tender.
6. Drain off excess fat. Stir in garlic. Add undrained tomatoes, uncooked rice, water, salt, black pepper and Worcestershire sauce.
7. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer covered for 20 minutes or until rice is tender.8. Remove pan from heat and stir in shredded Mexican cheese.
9. Using a small ice cream scoop, stuff peppers with meat mixture. Place in a deep baking dish.
10. Bake, covered with foil in a 350° oven for 30 minutes.
11. Uncover and top each pepper with a slice of provolone. Switch oven to broil and with the oven door cracked open so you can see in, leave the peppers in just long enough for the cheese to melt.
Notes:
If you use the original recipe from the link above don't put too much stock in the nutrional facts that they supply. There's a note that says those nummbers were calculated without considering the ground beef and it's hard to believe you can get up to 560 calories a serving on just veggies and a little rice. If you're a calorie counter, you're going to have to do this one the hard way. Add up the calories of all your ingredients and divide by six.
The recipe directs to bake the peppers for 30 minutes, but if you make them ahead of time like we did and store them in the fridge all day, 50 minutes is needed to cook them through.
The Verdict:
I thought this recipe came out quite good and I found it easy to make for any regular week night since the prep time wasn't too long. Even better was that, one this particular day, since we started earlier, dinner was made by noon and all I had to do was pop it in the oven later on. I love when the oven does all the work for me.
The reviews for this recipe on Recipe Zaar said that it could have used a little more heat, so they added some hot sauce to the meat. I think our addition of the garlic and some heavy-handedness with the Worcestershire sauce solved that problem nicely.
The provolone as a great touch, mostly because I just like the way it melts beautifully on food. (Gotta think with the camera's eye, too!)
I took a little of my Dad's homemade tomato sauce home because I knew Matt would want to pour some over the top of the meat. We both really liked the flavor of the meat mixture and decided that it could be used for multiple dishes, like the filling for the Stuffed Cabbage or maybe some Chili Macaroni.
Oh yeah, and Matt? He ate the pepper after all.
Melted cheese works everytime.
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