Freekeh Stuffed Peppers - #CookBlogShare Week 4

You may have noticed recently I have been enjoying more and more vegetarian meals and wanted to change one of my favourite dishes into a meat free version.

I love roasted peppers, especially red, yellow and orange ones. Roasting them transforms their flavours and I normally enjoy them stuffed with a minced beef sauce. Making it into a meat free dish was easy. Like with a lot of my other meat free favourites I simply substitute the meat with a grain or lentils. With this recipe I have used the grain, freekeh.

Freekeh is a fairly new grain to me. I have used it in the past a couple of times. Freekeh is a cereal food made from green wheat that is roasted. It is used in a lot of Arabic meals and originates from there. Freekeh contains up to three times more fibre and protein than brown rice and is low in calories! So not only does it have a delicious nutty flavour it is also very good for you! I must admit that I love this grain, it has a lot more flavour that rice and is so easy to add to meals. With this dish, it went perfectly!

This is what I did...

Freekeh Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

2 large peppers, I have used red but either yellow or orange will also work as they are sweet peppers

250g freekeh, I used the ready to eat Merchant Gourmet freekeh for convenience

1 lg courgette, quartered and sliced

1 yellow pepper, chopped

1 lg portabello mushrooms, chopped

1 400g tin of Cirio Datterini cherry tomatoes

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Spray olive oil

1 - Pre heat the oven to 200C

2 - Cook the freekeh as per instructions

3 - Heat a little spray olive oil in a pan

4 - Gently fry the onions over a medium heat, stirring regularly for 5 minutes or until soft

5 - Add the courgettes and yellow pepper and fry for a further 5 minutes

6 - Add the mushrooms and fry for a couple of minutes before adding the tin of tomatoes. I have chosen to use the datterini tomatoes as they are whole baby plum tomatoes in a rich tomato sauce. I love how the baby tomatoes are whole and add so much flavour to the dish.

6 - Stir in the cooked freekeh, mix thoroughly and remove from the heat

7 - Halve the peppers and remove all of the seeds

8 - Place the pepper halves in a roasting tin and spoon in the sauce

9 - Once the peppers are full place in the oven and roast for 25 minutes then remove and serve

These peppers are a perfect meal as they are or would make a delicious accompaniment to a good steak.

As it was only myself having this dish I had enough peppers left to make this meal go further. I placed the peppers in a blender and blended them down into a deliciously, thick sauce which is both a perfectly filling soup or an easy roasted pepper pasta sauce. To make the soup add an extra tin of tomatoes plus half a tin of water and blitz in a blender.

Enjoy x

Disclosure: I was sent a selection of Cirio products to try in my recipes. No cash payment was received.

I am sharing my recipe with Searching For Spice - Cook Once Eat Twice and Honest Mum - Tasty Tuesday

Now it is over to you. If you want to refresh your mind of the rules you can see them all here. 

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