Stuffed Peppers

Last Friday I decided that I should make stuffed peppers. I had almost talked myself out of it by the end of the weekend, because, as I've mentioned, I'm not a big fan of green pepper. Then as I was looking through the weekly circular for my grocery store, I saw that green peppers were on sale. Thus, I decided I should go through with it. 

I got this recipe from the Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook so I'm not going to include amounts for ingredients. The recipe is the third one on page 124. It includes: ground beef, onion, rice, eggs, milk, ketchup, salt, pepper, bell peppers (and hot sauce, which I omitted). 

I didn't have all of the ingredients on hand, so I needed to go to the store. I got the rice going in my rice cooker and went to pick up the peppers and ground beef. When I got back the rice was ready, but I wasn't so I left it on warm. I set the hamburger to brown. Then I capped and cored the peppers. I started out trying to cut the tops like I would a pumpkin, but the irregular heights and small diameter made turns difficult. I switched to making several cuts that overlapped. On the first pepper I tried using the knife to cut out some of the white inner part. This resulting in cutting part of the outside, so I switched to using my hand. The hamburger wasn't quite done, so I went ahead and chopped the onion. I forgot to rinse it so it made my eyes water pretty badly. Fortunately, I was able to take a break to deal with the hamburger. I put some water over the onions in an attempt to reduce the fumes before going to turn off the hamburger. I then added the hamburger and rice to a medium sized bowl. I then made a brief attempt at chopping the onion more finely (I was going for a rough approximation to rice-sized), before adding it to the bowl as well. I beat the egg into a measuring cup (less dishes) and added it, milk, ketchup, salt, and pepper to the bowl. 

I had been planning on mixing these together by hand, but, at some point during all this, I had cut my hand. I ended up using the rice paddle to mix everything instead. I sprayed my crock pot with cooking spray, stuffed the peppers with the mix and put them into the crock pot. I was surprised at how well the amount of stuffing worked for my peppers--using all of the stuffing resulted in slight overflow for the peppers. The mixture also looked and smelled a lot better than I had anticipated. When I finished I was looking forward to eating the peppers, which isn't something I normally say about green bell peppers. The recipe has times for low and high. I went with high because I was doing this at lunch and wanted the peppers to be ready for dinner. 

I know that I use my crock pot a lot, but most of the recipes could probably be adapted for other mediums. I still haven't gotten over the fact that I can do some prep work, walk away for hours, and come back to delicious food. It has also been fairly convenient for my schedule. 

Anyway, as the day went on this started smelling more like bell peppers. When I went to take them out, I noticed that the nonstick spray had mostly gathered in the bottom of the crock. One of the peppers had burned onto the side and that's the one that I chose for tonight (less pepper without the stuck stuff). Happily, the bell pepper had lost its strong flavor. The insides were delicious. Even though the pepper fell apart so that it would have been easy to eat around, I ate all of the pepper. I'm not sure that this would normally constitute a whole dinner, but with it and two glasses of milk I ended up reasonably full.