Easy like a Sunday Morning

These stuffed peppers are as pretty as they are easy to make.  Both peppers are hot banana peppers. One is red because it sat in the refrigerator for longer and started to turn colors. Nevertheless, I deemed it still appropriate for cooking. I have made stuffed bell peppers before and thought it would not be any different for stuffing these. Todd made his weekly trip to the meat house and had purchased some ground grass fed sirloin, thus came the inspiration for the meal! One meatless and one with meat.  For hybrid households like mine- I like to cook up a lot of meat at once and then I can add it where I see fit for the remainder of the week so that the carnivore does not begin to froth at the mouth unnecessarily.


Preheat the oven to 350. Cut off the tops of your peppers and set aside. Go ahead and brown your meat in a separate pan. In another pan sweat your onions on medium heat with a little olive oil and salt and pepper (this means cook them until they are translucent and is different than caramelizing them- but if you take it to that level of doneness, it will add a sweet flavor to the dish). Add some minced garlic to this and cook. To this mixture add 1-2 diced tomatoes and cook until soft.  Add 1 cup of brown rice.

Now it’s time to add spices! You can customize this to your taste buds. We like spicy things so I added pepper flakes, the habanero sauce del gary and some Sriracha. (On fire!) BUT if you could take this Italian and add rosemary, basil or oregano- it just depends on what you like. 

For the meat-less variety- stuff this mixture into your pepper with a spoon. For the meat lovers variety- add the mix to ¼ cup of your browned sirloin and stuff your peppers accordingly.

Bake in the oven for 35-45 minutes or until the peppers have softened- as you can see below they are slightly wrinkled. They also get slightly brown, which is not evident from the picture below.

ENJOY!