Picking Pecks of Peppers

We always plant our peppers from seeds on January 1st.  We've eaten plenty of peppers all throughout the year.  Unusually high rainfall earlier in the year sickened our peppers, even causing some of them to die.  It hurt their yield.  Now that cooler weather has set in, the peppers are very happy and they are producing peppers faster than we can eat them.  That's a good problem to have, I guess.

We picked two buckets full of jalapenos the other afternoon.  We have a mild jalapeno and a hot jalapeno.  I planted them too close together and they have cross pollinated, so they are all very hot now.  Even as we picked the larger ones, the sheer weight of the smaller peppers weighed down the branches.

We've cooked with them, dried a bunch of them and eaten a whole lot of them.  We'll make jalapeno poppers again pretty soon.  That's our favorite thing to do with them.  I'll have to check our inventory of Pepper Jelly in the pantry to see if we can make more.  That's a good snack!

The sweet bell peppers are producing nicely, too.  Just the other night, we had "dirty rice" for supper.  The next evening, Tricia picked some nice bell peppers, stuffed them with the leftover dirty rice, baked them, and we had stuffed bell peppers for supper.

The Lilac bell peppers are very healthy now, too.  We like colorful things in the garden and these fit the bill nicely.  Named lilac for their purple color, these peppers are just beautiful.  They are sweet, so the taste resembles a normal bell pepper.

The peppers are full of blooms and will continue producing until the first freeze kills them.  Until then we'll continue to enjoy.  Long about the time the freeze kills the mature plants, we'll plant replacements for them from seed on January 1st and start the process all over again.

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...

Stuffed Peppers for Supper

The other day we talked about some nice peppers we're harvesting right now.  They just didn't produce all summer, but now that the weather is really nice, they are blooming and loading up.

Purple Beauty Sweet Pepper

So we pick a bowlful and saute them with some onions and Tricia and I eat them all, so sweet and so good and flavorful.  Benjamin doesn't know what he's missing!

A nice haul of peppers

We decided that Stuffed Peppers would be nice for supper tonight.   Tricia pulled out her old Betty Crocker cookbook for the recipe.  The old cookbook is orange, and has frayed edges, showing that it has been well-used over the years.  

Ol' Betty

The pages are dog-eared and stained.  They also contain some pictures that were interesting with earth-tone appliances and a curious yellow smock being worn by everyone in the Betty Crocker test kitchens.

Confidence that only comes from wearing a yellow smock while cooking

Betty's recipe goes like this:

6 large green peppers (we used about double that amount)

1 pound hamburger

2 tablespoons chopped onion

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon garlic salt

1 cup cooked rice

1 can (15 oz.) tomato sauce

Clean and core the peppers and cook them in boiling water for 5 minutes and then drain.

Cook hamburger and onion until the hamburger is brown and drain.  Stir in salt, garlic salt, cooked rice, and the tomato sauce and heat.  Stuff each pepper with the mixture, stand upright in baking dish, cover and cook in oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  Uncover and cook 15 minutes longer.

This was a delicious meal fit for a king (and baked by a queen!)

Stuffed peppers and fresh green beans

Hopefully the peppers will keep producing as we're wanting more stuffed peppers for supper.  A twist I heard on this recipe is to squeeze out the contents of boudin into the peppers.  That sounds like something worth trying as well, but I'll tell you what - Betty Crocker's recipe is top-notch.