The Stuffed Peppers That Weren’t
I’ve been experimenting lately with Indian spices. Earlier in the week, I made tandoori marinated grilled chicken breasts that were great! Today I decided to play around a bit more with the spices that I bought at the Indian market.
I am trying to find more ways to enjoy chicken. It’s much healthier than beef and I’m feeling the need to eat more healthy foods. At the suggestion of one of my livejournal buddies, I went looking for ground chicken. The idea in my head was some sort of Indian spiced stuffed peppers, as I had 3 lovely red bell peppers in my fridge. I went by Wal-Mart (yes, I know that it’s the devil, but they have cereal much much cheaper than Kroger) and they did not have ground chicken. I didn’t feel like making two stops, so I went with ground turkey.
I dug through the fridge and found most of an onion and a few mushrooms. Sadly, the salad I’d planned on having with dinner had already gone brownish, and I won’t touch lettuce that is at all brown. I am picky, I admit it.
First, I dug in the cabinet for the last of the wild/brown rice and added a bit of basmati to round it off to a cup. This I put into a pan to cook with a can of beef broth and a wee bit of water.
I rough diced the onion, the mushrooms, one of the bell peppers, and 3 cloves of garlic. I preheated my largest everyday pan (gotta love that Calphalon!) with a little olive oil and tossed in the turkey and all of the veggies. To this I added 1 tablespoon of garam masala and a teaspoon of paprika, and sauted/fried/whatever until the meat was done. Turkey never seems to brown, but the spices gave it a browner color and most likely my dad would have never known that it wasn’t hamburger if I hadn’t told him.
While all of this cooked, I mixed up a tahini garlic sauce. I used 3 tablespoons of tahini, 1 clove of garlic, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, the juice of one lemon, 1 tablespoon of yogurt and a bit of water. It tasted rather bitter, so I tried adding a bit more yogurt and some paprika. It was still a bit on the bitter side, but I decided to let it be.
When the rice and meat were pretty much done, I dumped the rice in with the meat and veggies. To this I added an eight ounce can of tomato sauce and a bit of white wine. And plenty of salt.
Then I started the creamed corn. I cheated and started with a frozen log, but it’s some really tasty corn. I added some rosemary and turmeric to the corn while it heated.
Meanwhile, back in the other pan, there’s no way that all of this mixture is fitting into two lonely little peppers. So, I sliced them up into strips and arranged them on top of the filling mixture. Then I covered the pan and let the peppers steam while the corn warmed through.
When it was all done, it tasted wonderful. I spooned the meat and rice mixture onto a plate with some of the steamed pepper strips and drizzled it with a little of the tahini sauce. Beside that I put a spoonful of the creamed corn. It was so yummy that I could have eaten myself silly. No pictures, because it turned out looking like one of those pre-chewed dishes. Seems that most brownish colored dishes with rice included turn out like that.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
When I served it up it sounded like “glop.” The story of my life. I well understand the “it comes out brown” problem as it plagues me. I have tried to detract from the brown-ness by adding color at serving: chopped red bell pepper, basil leaves, anything with color.
Recently, at an Indian restaurant I paid close attention to the presentation, but it was mostly brown. Although, presenting each dish in a separate bowl or container helped. I’m thinking that studying Japanese food presentation will help. We’ll see!