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.
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