Hello lovelies, when the peppers at the market cost next to nothing and feel properly heavy in your hand, we make stuffed peppers with rice and artichokes. In Switzerland we call this vegetable Peperoni, in Germany the same thing is Paprika, and both of us mean this vegetarian oven dish that tastes of the south and is still doable on an ordinary Tuesday.
There is one rule and it is not negotiable: the rice has to be cooked first. There simply is not enough liquid inside a pepper for raw rice to soften in 30 minutes. Cold rice from the day before is actually the better starting point, because the grains then mix into the filling instead of clumping. My older and quite different version with leaf spinach lives in the stuffed peppers with spinach, if you fancy something greener.
The filling itself is essentially a small antipasti selection: sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts and capers, briefly reduced with onion and garlic in olive oil. I chop the capers roughly, because whole ones turn into little salt bombs as you eat while chopped ones spread their flavour across the entire filling.
The bed of tomatoes under the peppers looks like styling but is the actual trick. It steams the halves tender from below while the cheese turns golden on top, and along the way it becomes the sauce I spoon onto the plate. I love sun-dried tomatoes in exactly that role, which is why they also go into my sweet potato risotto with dried tomatoes.
There is almost always some of the 200 gr (7 oz.) of rice left over, and that is a good thing. The next day I turn it into a cold salad, exactly like my black rice salad with mango, only with whatever happens to be in the fridge.
I hope these peppers land on your table as often as they do on ours while the season lasts. They need little more than something green alongside, and for that I reach for my radicchio salad with oven-roasted vegetables.
