Making Stuffed Bell Peppers with a Cajun Twist

We have a Purple Beauty Bell Pepper Plant in the garden that survived the winter and is loaded up with nice, big fat purple peppers.  We cook with them quite often.  Tricia makes ‘dirty rice’ and stuffs the peppers and bakes them.  It is a big favorite at our house.  I was talking to a buddy the other day who told me an idea on how to up our Stuffed Bell Pepper game.  Here’s how we did it:

                                                                                                                                

First, we picked a peck of purple (and red) peppers from the garden:  (We didn't really pick a peck.  A peck is 2 gallons.)

The strange thing about it is that if the purple peppers stay on the plant for too long, they turn red.  Oh well…

Then we cut the tops off of each pepper to make a receptacle in which to carry our stuffing.  We don’t waste the tops that we cut off, though.  That is cubed up and used to cook with later on.  You'll notice that only the outside of the pepper is purple; the inside is green.  I guess this definitively proves that beauty is only skin deep...

Then we dunk the peppers in some boiling water prior to stuffing them.  Here’s where things went a little haywire, but it won’t affect the taste.  If you notice below, all of our beautiful purple peppers turned green once put in boiling water.  The red ones retained their color, but sadly, the purple bell peppers were now green.

Now for the pièce de résistance.  Rather than stuffing with dirty rice, we are going to use some spicy boudin from Cormier’s Specialty Meats right here in town.  Cormier’s has good boudin, sausage, stuffed chickens, cracklins and any other type of Cajun specialty meat you want to buy.

I first began just squeezing the boudin stuffing out of the casing and into each pepper, but boy, was that ever a mess!

While it got the job done, there is a more efficient way, and that is to slice the casing off with a sharp knife and grab chunks of the boudin and stuff into the peppers that are all lined up in baking dishes.  In no time flat, all the peppers were stuffed and ready for the oven.

We placed these bad boys in the oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  Soon they came out of the oven and were ready to be consumed.  They smelled great!

Here's the 'money' shot:

Boudin Stuffed Bell Peppers.  Not bad at all!  It certainly kicked them up a notch...