Melissa said I could blog this recipe so here we go. I am her husband, the nerdy guy in the picture on the About page.
Being half-turkish means I ate a lot of Mediterranean food growing up. We ate everything from baba ghonoush to za’atar. While I was tortured on the playground for eating food that wasn’t stuffed between two very white pieces of Wonder Bread, I did cultivate a bit of a taste for ethnic foods at a young age.
I can still smell the kitchen when my mother would make stuffed peppers. There wasn’t a stuffed pepper I wouldn’t eat. Ground beef, tomato, and rice stuffed peppers were always a good choice, but being that beef and I don’t get along too much anymore, I obviously won’t be sharing that recipe. But, I can say unequivocally, my favorite pepper was rice, onion, and raisin stuff peppers. I adored these things most likely because they had raisins, and I love raisins. It’s a kid-in-me thing I guess.
The recipe is below and this is my vegan take on the recipe. My mother use to add meat to this one as well, but I’ve removed it. I hope you enjoy.
Black Rice Stuffed Peppers
Ingredients
- 2 cups cooked black rice
- 1/3 diced yellow onion
- 2 tbsp parsley
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/4 cup raisins
- salt to taste
- 1 red pepper
- 1 yellow pepper
- olive oil (to taste)
Instructions
- Put everything but the peppers in a pan and let cook covered for about 10-15 minutes on medium heat. When you remove the rice mixture, the onions should be soft, but not brown.
- As the rice mixture is cooking, pre-heat oven to 400.
- Also, get your peppers out, wash them off, cut the top off the pepper and remove all the white fleshy bits from the pepper. I also washed the inside of the pepper to get any straggling seeds left behind.
- Once the rice is done, I brushed the peppers with a bit of olive oil to keep them moist in the oven, stuffed them with my rice mixture, and put them in the oven for 20 minutes.
- Enjoy!!!
Recipe Notes
If you want a head start, you can cook the rice a night or two before you start this and refrigerate. We always try to keep some cooked rice around and we love black rice but really any non-processed rice would do. I added some oil to the rice to make sure it didn’t burn.