Food of the Month

I just returned from an eight day trip in the Pacific north west and Canada and while part of September is over it's still not to late to enjoy this months food. Peppers! They come in many shapes, sizes, colors and spice levels.

The Scoville Heat Scale is a great way to see what level of pepper is best for you. 

To start the celebration of the food of the month I made Un-Stuffed Peppers. You may be asking why I made the recipe "unstuffed." It came down to the size of my peppers. I was planning to make stuffed peppers for dinner but all the peppers I wanted to stuff were too small to fit much filling so instead I mixed all the things you would put in a stuffed pepper together in a dish and baked it. I am eating this dish as I type my blog post and OMG it's AMAZING! Every year when I make stuffed peppers I just use up what I have in my fridge and that is what this recipe was but the flavors came together perfect. The pepper mix was perfect since my husband and I like a small kick in our dishes.  This is a great dish that we will definitely have again!

"UN-Stuffed" Peppers

Ingredients: 

-2 cups brown rice (cook according to instructions. I did 2 cups of brown rice with 4 cups chicken stock)
-You could use any combination of peppers. Here is what I used: 7 small Bell Peppers, 1 Banana Pepper, 1 Jalapeno (without seeds), 1 unknown hot pepper from crop share (the dark green one), diced
-2 shallots, diced
-1/4 cup cilantro, diced
-1 tsp cumin
-1 tbsp Italian Parsley, chopped
-3 chicken sausages, cut into slices (you could also sub boca crumbles here for a vegetarian dish)
-1 small zucchini (or in my case it was 1/3 of a large one)
-2 ears of corn, cook and add only the kernels
-2 ounce of cheese (any type of shredded or diced cheese will work)
Directions:
Cook rice according to directions. Stir all ingredients in a big bowl with the cooked rice and mix. Grease a 9 x 11 pan and pile ingredients in.
Bake at 400 for ~35-40 minutes

"Unstuffed" Pepper dish pre-baking

The beauty of this dish is it's flexibility. Don't have one of the ingredients or want to add another vegetable, go for it.

...just went and got seconds...time to go.