I have made it to almost the end of the main dishes section of this cookbook. This book is flying by and then I only have desserts and drinks remaining.

But for now, let’s focus on today’s recipe: stuffed peppers. Well, the recipe says you can use large tomatoes or peppers but I much prefer the latter. You could also do a mix of both but they do have different cooking times so you would likely have to use two separate baking dishes.

The filling for these peppers is essentially a side dish on its own. It is made of rice and chickpeas, and has lots of good flavour from garlic, onion and spices. It starts by sauteing the onion and then adding the garlic, spices, rice and broth and letting it all cook down until the liquid is absorbed. I actually did this first part at night and then put it in the fridge until the next day. I just wanted to make the dinner time prep a bit quicker since these have to bake for quite a while in the oven.

The next day, I added chickpeas, lemon juice, parsley and mint into the rice. I love the freshness of the herbs in here. Once all those ingredients are mixed in, the filling was ready to go. I stuffed my hollowed out peppers (I had lots of leftover filling) and then popped them in the oven. They took about 45 minutes to get fully tender and they smelled so good.

This was such a good dinner. These are a little bit of a mess to eat because once you cut into the pepper, all the rice comes pouring out, but it was a delicious mess. All the herbs and spices were perfect in here and I like the protein from the chickpeas. It is quite a balanced meal – grain, protein and vegetable. But like I said before, you could totally just make the rice/chickpea mixture and serve that as a side dish too.