Recipe Grilled and baked Sweet Peppers and Mushrooms stuffed with veal, pork, cranraisins, and Pecorino-Romano cheese served on Baked Spaghetti Squash with a tomato sauce
Today was a crescendo of food complexity.
It started with yogurt, milk, granola, and grapes.
Ascended upward with lunch of the PPI Seafood Soup made yesterday with an onion and cheese bruschetta.
And reached its zenith with a dinner of new recipes featuring the best of our local growers’ harvest bounty.
Stuffed Sweet Peppers and Mushrooms
I was looking for stuffed sweet peppers all over Romania, but never found that dish. So when we went to the Farmers’ market last Saturday, we bought 8 lovely medium sized sweet peppers (orange, red, and yellow), two bunches of freshly picked carrots, and 7 or 8 heirloom Roma style tomatoes.
Then on Sunday when we went to Costco, we bought a 24 oz. container of large white mushrooms and afterward went to Sprouts, where we bought fresh Italian pork sausage and 1 lb. of ground veal.
Yesterday Suzette made a wonderfully flavorful almost sweet tomato sauce with the heirloom tomatoes and a carrot.
Tonight Suzette finished the dish.
She sautéed ½ medium brown onion, the filling from two pork sausages, the pound of veal, a handful of cranraisins, some minced Pecorino-Romano cheese, and garlic in olive oil and butter.
Then she cut out the stem from the sweet peppers and stuffed them.
Then she grilled the stuffed peppers on the grill.
Finally she baked the sweet peppers in the tomato sauce in a large casserole.
There was stuffing left, so we decided to stuff eight large mushrooms and baked them in the oven at low heat.
I opened a bottle of my new favorite Spanish value priced Rioja, 2010 Vina Real Crianza (Costco $11.99). I like the smoothness of this red. Its lack of harsh tannins, goes particularly well with food, especially the lighter, more subtle flavors of a vegetable driven dinner, such as tonight’s dinner.
While the peppers and mushrooms were cooking, Suzette stripped the strands of squash from the inside of the spaghetti squash she grew in the garden at the Center and had roasted on Saturday and heated about two pounds of strands in a plastic container in the microwave.
Suzette then plated our dinner in pasta bowls, first with a pile of spaghetti squash strands, then two stuffed sweet peppers, then a spoonful or two of tomato sauce, and finally two stuffed mushrooms and a garnish of grated Pecorino-Romano cheese.
Willy and Luke joined us for dinner, so dinner was particularly special in two respects. It was a fabulous harvest meal and it was a family meal with our whole family unit in attendance. Conversation was lively as we enjoyed this special meal. Willy told us how he had done maps for an important traffic analysis for the City of Rio Rancho.
Luke described his impending house sitting scheduled for November and December in Cedar Crest for a lady spending the holiday season in Germany.
Since we would all be spending the holidays in Albuquerque we discussed Thanksgiving and decided to cook a traditional meal at home and to perhaps invite some folks.
I think one of the important characteristics of a dinner made with fresh local ingredients is its lack of exciting flavor notes. It is the ultimate comfort food when done properly, as was tonight’s dinner. It tastes fresh and is very digestible and sits well in the stomach. It satisfies in a very different way than normal restaurant food. It has little fat, salt, or chemicals. It’s deceptively bland in the same way that a good champagne and fresh oysters are deceptively bland in an elegant way. The unifying characteristic of all fresh local food for me is the ingredients’ unadulterated fresh flavor.
I went to bed after dinner at around 8:30 and slept until 4:00.
Bon Appetit
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