This Stuffed Green Bell Pepper Recipe is a delicious way to use up your bell pepper crop.
One way to deal with a surplus of green peppers is to freeze them. Another is to use them in the following bell pepper
recipe.
Stuffed Green Bell Pepper Recipe
What’s unique about this stuffed pepper recipe (which came
to me — via a friend — from Yugoslavia) is that all
the cooking is done over a burner. There’s no baking
involved . . . which means you can forget about using the
oven — and heating up the entire house — on an
already-scorching-hot summer afternoon.
8 green peppers
2/3 cup of uncooked rice
2 tablespoons of cooking oil
1 small onion, diced
garlic to taste (optional)
1 pound of lean ground beef
1 six-ounce can of tomato paste
3 cups of water
salt and pepper
Cut the tops off the peppers (set the tops aside), dispose
of the peppers’ ribs and seeds, and set the cleaned fruits
upright in a fairly deep saucepan.
Next, heat the rice in the cooking oil in a frying pan,
and — when the rice begins to turn brown — add the
onion. (You can — if you want — toss in a bit of garlic,
too.) When both the rice and the onion have browned, add
the ground beef to the pan, break the meat into small
chunks, and cook until brown. Then stuff the peppers about
half full with the rice-onion-beef mixture.
All right. Now empty the can of tomato paste into a clean
frying pan and brown the lump of paste. (Swish the tomato
solids around until they’ve visibly darkened.) Add three
cups of water to the pan, stir to dissolve the browned
paste, and salt and pepper to taste.
Finally, pour the tomato sauce into and
around each of the stuffed peppers so that the
bulging fruits are both filled with and
standing in liquid. Put the tops back on the
peppers, cover the saucepan tightly, and cook over low heat
until the rice is done (30 to 45 minutes). That’s it!
You’ve just created a hearty (yet economical) meal for
four!
I like to set each pepper in a soup dish, ladle some tomato
sauce over the meat-packed fruit, and top the whole thing
off with a good-sized gob of yogurt or sour cream. If you
have other serving ideas, however, by all means go ahead
and experiment!
Once you discover how easy it is to freeze them for future
use — or how delectable they can be when stuffed
according to the above recipe — you just may wish that
bumper crop of green peppers had been even bigger yet!
Read more about preserving your bell pepper crop: How
to Freeze Bell Peppers From the Garden.
