Pick a peck of piquant peppers

Please excuse the misuse of this line from the old nursery rhyme, but it was crying out to be adapted for this post. It’s quite a short entry this week, but I was rather pleased with the stuffing recipe I recently created for stuffed peppers and wanted to share it.

I had fancied doing stuffed peppers for a while. When refilling the cupboards in my newly fitted kitchen I discovered an open bag of couscous that had been ignored in the old kitchen. Couscous is something I tend to buy for a specific recipe then leave to languish because it seems difficult to make it exciting enough to serve with any frequency. I also had some pork left over from making a batch of pork in mustard and mushroom sauce (A pig and a poke in the taste buds). Peppers, pork and couscous? I felt some Moroccan flavours coming on.

We have a healthy spice cupboard so I had everything I needed to hand. 

I decided to marinade the pork, but I think that this recipe would work well if the spice mix were used immediately, so long as the seeds etc are toasted before use to help release the full flavour. This recipe is also easily adaptable to a vegetarian version, and I’ll be trying it out with cubes of butternut squash instead of the pork.

I have cooked stuffed peppers before as they’re very easy to do, but I seldom serve them because I dither so much about what to serve with them. To serve two peppers per person seems a bit much or possibly just lacking variety, but one pepper seems to need some kind of accompaniment. I would normally supplement a dish with a carbohydrate product, but in stuffed peppers rice, couscous or similar is already included.

In the end I opted for sweet potato wedges. Sweet potatoes are sometimes called “yam”; to clarify, I mean the orange-fleshed sweet potato not the white-fleshed yam. Despite belonging to the carbohydrate group, I find sweet potatoes less dense than potatoes and the sweetness seemed particularly complementary to the spiced pepper stuffing. The wedges can be roasted at the same temperatures as the peppers in only 20 min or so, without par boiling. I just tossed them in a little olive oil and sprinkled them with dried rosemary, although fresh rosemarry would be fine, especially if cooking a larger amount. I also served a few spears of broccoli for colour contrast. Other suitable, less starchy accompaniments might be pearl barley or quinoa, but I suppose they can present the same conundrum as couscous in that they require an injection of flavour.

There is, of course, a seemingly endless variety of fillings for peppers. I thought I would just add one more!

Moroccan stuffed peppers

Serves 4

300 g lean pork

1 medium onion finely chopped

100 g mushrooms roughly chopped

1 stick of celery finely chopped

120 g cherry tomatoes halved or quartered, dependent on size

4 large peppers

150 g couscous

For the marinade

2 tsp coriander seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

3 cloves

4 black pepper corns

4 green cardamom pods

Half tsp turmeric

Quarter nutmeg grated

Half tsp cinnamon

Half tsp allspice

2 tsp paprika

2 tsp dried oregano

3 hot dried chillies (alter number according to taste)

2 cloves garlic

2.5 cm fresh root ginger peeled

2 tsp vegetable oil

Dice the pork into 1 cm cubes, removing any fat, and put in a bowl or dish. In a dry frying pan gently warm the coriander and cumin seeds, cloves, pepper corns and cardamom pods until the coriander seeds start to colour slightly and release their aroma. Grind these and all the other marinade ingredients into a paste with a hand blender. Spoon the mix over the pork and stir around until the pork is well coated. Cover and set aside in the fridge for a few hours to overnight.

Heat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF/gas mark 4. Soak the couscous in 125 ml boiling water and leave for around 5 min until all the water has been absorbed. Cut the tops off the peppers, remove the seeds and membranes from inside and stand them upright (open end up) in an ovenproof dish.

In a frying pan gently cook the onion, celery and mushrooms until the onion has softened and started to turn translucent. Add the cherry tomatoes and cook for a few minutes. Chop up the flesh from the discarded pepper tops and add to the pan. Add the pork and all the spice mix and cook until the pork has cooked through (this should only take a few minutes). Stir in the couscous.

Spoon the mix into the peppers until full, drizzle with a little olive oil and bake in the oven for 35–40 min until the peppers are tender. Serve immediately.

Salad days

When I started writing this post it looks decidedly unlike summer. The rain had been pouring half the morning and the skies were a grim mottled grey. That it’s warm while raining, though, gives away the fact that it is surely the good old British summer. The increasing temperatures have meant moving away from my winter soups and trying to get creative with cold lunches.

Last winter was one of the hardest in the UK for years. It was a pleasure, therefore, to make soup every week, as there’s something comforting about a bowl of hot soup when it is freezing outside. Soups are also a handy way of getting an additional portion or two of vegetables into the daily diet. They were abandoned, however, when the heat ramped up suddenly and the UK launched apace into one of the driest springs on record.

For cold lunches the options pretty much come down to salad or sandwiches. Although within those categories the sub-options might be myriad, I never feel the latter offers much chance to keep up the midday vegetable fix. Additionally, I’m partial to toast for breakfast, so prefer to avoid a second bread-laden meal on too many days. So, we took up the salad challenge.

The concept of salad in the UK seems to have shifted during my lifetime. In my memory the salad of the 1970s comprised round or iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and a variety of mayonnaise-slathered temperate-climate vegetables, such as potatoes, cabbage, carrots and peas. Things remained fairly similar throughout my teenage years except that little gem (baby Romaine/Cos) lettuces became ridiculously popular. From my early adulthood onwards, though, the diversity developed until many varieties¸ such as Romaine endive/chicory, frisée, radicchio, lollo rosso, rocket, chard, lamb’s lettuce, watercress, spinach, have become widely available, and all we have to do is grab a bag on the way home.

In restaurants I’ve noticed changes too. In the 1970s and 1980s, I only remember salad being used to any great extent in starters - a few lettuce leaves under prawn cocktail, the garnish on the side of a plate, or perhaps even a mixed salad as a starter in its own right. Salads have, however, ascended to the role of main course, especially Caesar salad and salade Niçoise. Most versions, though, seem unworthy of this accolade as they are nearly all leaf couple with only a smattering of the more-expensive protein ingredient ­– two if you’re lucky. On the plus side, though, salads have become more adventurous. I recently had a beautiful smoked duck, walnut, pear and blue cheese salad as a starter.

At the other end of the scale, anywhere you can buy pre-packed sandwiches these days you can buy pre-made salads. The cheaper ones contain mainly pasta, with lots of sauce or mayonnaise, which keeps the price down and the full-belly feeling up. Those that do feature the more-traditional salad vegetables can cost a small fortune for a small sized portion with a narrow range of ingredients, and frequently seem rather unsatisfying.

Our homemade salad lunches fall somewhere pleasantly between these points on the spectrum. They have something of a retro feel because the leaf constituent is pretty simple – generally iceberg or Romaine – but this is only a small part of the whole. We use a range of ingredients to achieve a lot of flavour, colour and texture and to provide a balance of fibre, protein, fat, carbohydrate etc. Thus, as well as vegetables, we include a few spoonfuls of a pulse and a protein item, such as cold cooked meat or a slice of quiche. Anything that is pleasant cold is probably fair game, really. Enhancements have included a mustard vinaigrette (3 parts extra virgin olive oil to 1 part red wine vinegar, a good pinch of sugar and Dijon mustard to taste), noodles with a soy sauce dressing and chopped fresh chillies, and a curried mayonnaise or yoghurt dressing for the chicken.

The salads fit neatly into an average sized sandwich box, which makes them ideal for the delectable Mr M to take to work. I’m hopeful that there’s plenty of warm weather still to come so we can come up with new salad ideas, but whatever happens I won’t be going down the route of ‘posh’ gastro-pub-like salads. They’re just not my style!

 Basic salad with mustard vinaigrette and noodle salad with soy sauce dressing