Stuffed Peppers

For my Genius Hour project this week, I actually ended up cooking two different dishes! The first dish I cooked was stuffed peppers. The recipe seemed simple enough, and I ended dup modifying it a little in order to make it a bit healthier, as well as use ingredients that I already had. This recipe called for

* 1 lb ground beef  (I substituted this for ground turkey)
*  5-6 Bell peppers (I ended up using 3)
* 1 cup of rice
* 1 cup black beans
* 1 cup corn
* 1 cup  red enchilada sauce   (I ended up not using this, as I wasn't sure where to find it)
* 3/4 of a cup of mixed cheese
* 1/2 a teaspoon of chili power
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin  (I ended up just getting taco seasoning instead)
Additional toppings that I added:
- Salsa, and sour cream (once finished)

The process itself was a little more time consuming than I thought, as I had to cook the rice (which I never considered), but overall it was fairly easy.  As I cooked the rice I cleaned out the peppers in order to add the rest of the ingredients.

The one challenge that I had with this recipe was that I don't have any concept of what one pound is.  I bought some ground turkey from the grocery store that is measured in kilograms. Looking back now, it would have been smart to maybe google how many Kgs a pound is, but of course I did not think of that at the time.  I decided I would just cook all of the ground turkey from the package. Once I cooked the turkey I realized that this is, in fact, quite a lot of meat,  and more than likely more meat than I actually needed for this recipe. Being the stubborn, and apparently illogical person that I am, I decided to just use all the meat.  I mean, why wouldn't it fit in those small medium sized peppers?

                     

Oddly enough, a full package of meat, combined with cheese, rice, beans and corn did not fit into three medium sized peppers.

So as you can see, I will be eating these leftovers for the next three days. Actually as I am posting this blog, I have already eaten the leftovers for two meals now, and I still have at least another meal of them leftover. That was not the only mistake I made when creating this dish. As I was mixing all the ingredients I actually forgot to add the taco seasoning. This meant that the dish had no seasoning besides salt and pepper. I did not actually realize this until about 10 mins before the pepper were done, as I saw the taco seasoning sitting unopened on the counter.

All-in-all the pepper actually turned out really good!  My boyfriend was up for the weekend, so he was my guinea pig who got to try the dish. Besides the lack of seasoning, I really enjoyed them, and I think this will be a dish I will make again in the future. It was relatively cheap to make, as well as easy. I also think the meat could be substituted for tofu in order to create a vegetarian dish that is also cheaper than using meat.

Stay tuned for my next blog, as I create a Buffalo Chicken Dip for the Super bowl!