Night at the Improv, Part II

On the same afternoon I made the frankencookies, I decided to make stuffed peppers.  We had gone to an orchard that morning, and I bought three poblano peppers, and we had a little ground beef in the freezer.  The thing is, I had made stuffed peppers with Betty's recipe before, and I wasn't crazy about them.  So I made up everything on my own, thusly:

~ 1/2 # ground beef
1/4 # sweet Italian beef sausage
1 C uncooked rice
1 small tomato I found in the crisper
generous handful (about a cup, maybe a little more) grated cheddar
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 generously proportioned, full-bodied poblano peppers

Boil peppers 5 minutes to soften them a little.

Cook the rice.  I've found that despite the package directions, I get pretty good rice in about 25 minutes.  Halve the peppers lengthwise, keeping in mind they'll need to become bowls soon, so cut them to make deep pockets.  Discard stems and seeds, put the pepper halves in a pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, and cook five minutes to soften them a little.  While the rice simmers away at the back of the stove, cook the beef, sausage, and garlic.  By the way, is your stove in the corner, against a wall, like mine?  Does that force you to have pot and spatula handles in the middle of the range instead of off to the side, out of your way?  Did you fail to consider this, and leave a metal spatula handle sticking out of the meat pan where it could get heated by the pot boiling the peppers and burn the shit out of your hand when you grabbed it?  Put some ice on that.  When the meat's done, dice the tomato and toss that in there, too.  The rice should be done by now, if you planned well (and except for the spatula handle, I did), so you can add that and the cheese to the meat mixture and stir it all together over low heat.

Pretty much any meal can be improved with the inclusion of good sausage.

By this time, I had decided that I wanted to make popovers, too, but the popovers cook at two different temperatures (first high, then a little lower towards the end), and neither was where I planned to bake the peppers, so I compromised and set the oven at 375F.

Filled pepper halves, just before I baked them.  They didn't last long enough after baking to get their picture taken again.

Turn off all your burners and start spooning filling into pepper halves.  Set them in a glass baking dish.  I had a little filling left over, so if your amounts are all the same as mine, and your peppers are the same size, you might need four instead of three (eight halves instead of six).  I baked them about half an hour, maybe forty minutes, with the popovers.  Faked my way through the whole meal, and all of it was tasty.  I was really happy with how the peppers turned out, and felt even better about that because I really hadn't liked Betty's recipe the first time I made them.  However, I'd add some cumin and curry powder if I did it again (and I probably will).