Riso venere and peppers – a perfect couple!

Hey there!

So first off I want to say sorry for not posting in so long but I just didn’t get around to much cooking in the past few days. I actually spent the pastweekend in the amazing city of Berlin and now we’ve got choir concerts all week long hence I haven’t got much time for what is probably my favourite part of the day, my cooking sessions. Yet I’ll still share a recipe with you today, though I have to be honest and tell you that I actually cooked this a while ago but didn’t get around to uploading so far.

Anyways who cares about my busy life, we’re all here to create and read about wonderful food. So the recipe I want to show you today is one for stuffed peppers, a rather basic meal, usually prepared with a filling made of rice and mince. However since I like to keep my meals meat free I had to go for a different version. Instead of meat I used my absolute favourite tofu, which is the basil tofu by Taifun. Then I also used some olives, capers, pine nuts, eggplant and obviously some seasoning. I actually decided to stick to the original recipe by using rice yet instead of ordinary white rice I opted for riso venere, an extremely delicious nearly black rice from Italy.

 

The outcome of my creation was absolutely delicious; riso venere and peppers just make a perfect couple, which you should most definitely try out. Such a great experience for your taste buds, trust me.

 

Anyways I have got to run now, choir practice is calling and I would much rather not be late there’s still a tad of fine-tuning to do…

 

So here you go the recipe for this delicious dinner, which actually doesn’t take too long to make.

 

 

 

 

• 100g riso venere**
• 1 onion
• 100g black olives (unpitted)
• 2tsp capers
• 2tbs pine nuts
• 200g Taifun basil tofu*
• 2 eggplants
• 4 peppers
• 140g tomato puree
• white wine
• water
• olive oil
• salt
• pepper

 

 

 

1. Chop up your onion and half your peppers.
2. Put your halved peppers into the oven and turn the heat up to 180°C, don’t preheat your oven) let them bake for 25 minutes, the remove from the oven.
3. While the pepper halves are baking prepare your rice according to package directions, you’ll need the chopped onion for that as well as your white wine.
4. Meanwhile you can start on the rest of your filling. Finely dice your eggplant, pit your olives and then finely chop them together with the capers.
5. Toast up your pine nuts in a pan, when they’re slightly browned crumble in your tofu and add your cubed eggplant. Fry on medium low heat until the eggplant have browned slightly, then lower the heat and cover until the eggplant has softened.
6. When the eggplant cubes have softened add the tomato puree, 1 dl water, your chopped capers and olives and salt to taste. Mix well.
7. By now your rice should be done so you can add it to the rest of the filling.
8. When you mixed the cooked rice into the eggplant mixture stuff your pepper halves and put them back into the oven for another ten minutes just to make sure they’re hot when you serve them.

 

Voila your stuffed peppers are finished. I just love the combination of riso venere and peppers. As mentioned before I think they make the perfect couple. The addition of the other ingredients just makes it even more delicious and you end up with an amazing tasting stuffed pepper, which in my opinion is so much tastier than the original rather bland version with its mince and rice stuffing.

 

I promise I’ll soon be back with some new creation; I’m probably the one who’s most excited about finally being able to create some more new recipes.

 

Bisous

Fanny, the foodie

 

Product information for all my Swiss reader:

 

**Riso venere can be bought at Coop from the fine food section or at the deli of Globus or Jelmoli

* Taifun basil tofu is available at most organic food shops in Switzerland and there’s also a basil tofu available at coop from the karma lin