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...

Picking a Peck of Purple Peppers

Well okay, not really.  A peck is actually a unit of measure.  To help you define how much a peck is, Wikipedia tells us that two pecks equal a kenning.  Well that didn't help at all did it?  It also tells us four pecks make a bushel.  Now we're talking. Although I didn't actually pick a peck of purple peppers yesterday, the alliteration sounds nice, doesn't it?  I did pick a few and will likely pick several pecks of purple peppers before all is said and done.

We grow several types of peppers from seed that is started way back in January. The peppers are really producing now and I have been harvesting some for Tricia to cook for us.  Although Benjamin doesn't eat them, Tricia and I love them.  Let's take a look at the Purple Beauty Peppers we grow. We purchase them from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Like most of the plants we grow, they are open pollinated, heirlooms so you can save the seeds year after year. Here is one ready to be harvested now!:

The Purple Beauty Pepper

These pepper plants are compact and bushy and they just load up with abundant fruit.  This is not a hot pepper at all.  They are similar to a green bell pepper (sweet), except they are deep purple - almost black.  They are green at first and then they turn purple.  If left on the plant they will turn red, and some people say that that is when they are at the peak of flavor.  We always pick them when they are purple.  The beauty and novelty of the color of the pepper is nice.  As far as size, it is not a large pepper.  The largest I've picked is about the size of a tennis ball.

Prolific Purple Peppers

All of our peppers (Jalapeno, Chocolate, Purple, Anaheim, Criolla Sella) have really struggled this summer in the heat and dry weather.  {Note to self: Purchase pvc pipe and put in irrigation as soon as we get rain and the ground softens enough for digging!} Now that things have cooled off a little and I've begun to water the garden daily, they have perked up and begun to produce nicely.  Here is a haul of green beans and peppers from one afternoon this week.

Tricia cooked up a nice mess of fresh green beans and then washed and sliced the peppers.  In a cast iron skillet with several pats of butter, she cooked the peppers down and we ate the sauteed peppers as a side dish.  So sweet and flavorful.  Pretty soon if the plants produce, I'll promptly pick plenty pecks of purple peppers!