Let’s hablo some dinner… a foodie photo blog!

Sophomore year of college I took Spanish Cooking as my winter study course.  As a result, I know a lot about manchego and quince paste and can make a killer tortilla.  One of my favorite recipes of the whole semester was stuffed piquillo peppers, but jarred whole piquillo peppers are tough to find in stores and I haven’t had it since.  (Incidentally, you can order all the piquillo peppers you want from LaTienda.com and I also recommend you go to LaTienda and buy me jamon for my birthday… 3 months and 1 day from tomorrow).

So here’s the problem: I had absolutely no recipe.  I mean, I remembered the dish was simple: just piquillo peppers, stuffed with picadillo, covered in a pepper cream sauce, and baked until bubbly and delicious.  This means this recipe train took off from Improvisation Station.

First, we make the picadillo.  There are a million variations on the recipe, but here’s mine adjusted to include what I had and omitting olives and raisins both traditionally included:

Picadillo Recipe

Ingredients:
1 lb lean ground beef
½ lb hot pork sausage
2 small (or 1 large) white onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsps extra-virgin olive oil
4 tsps chili powder
1 ½ tsps oregano
1 ½ tsps cumin
1 tsps ground cinnamon
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
2 Tbsps diced tomatoes
1 cup water
Salt & pepper

Instructions:
1. Season meat with salt and pepper and brown in large nonstick pan. Drain.
2. In same nonstick pan, heat oil on medium heat and throw in onions and garlic.
3. Add chili powder, oregano, cumin, cinnamon, and cayenne peppers. Stir and let spices warm for 1-2 minutes.
4. Add diced tomatoes to pan, stir.
5. Add browned meat and water to pan. Stir again, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

You’ll end up with something that looks like this (sorry, meat never photographs well):

Picadillo!

Now that we have the picadillo made, it’s time to deal with the prettiest peppers in all the land.  The jarred peppers are beautiful but very oily (a.k.a. slippery to remove from jar) and fragile (a.k.a. easy to damage in both the jar removal and stuffing processes).

Piquillo Peppers!

So then you need to VERY VERY GENTLY stuff the peppers with the (hopefully cooled) picadillo.  I couldn’t take pictures mid-stuffing because my hands were covered in oil and meat mixture.  Here they are all stuffed:

Piquillo Peppers Stuffed with Picadillo (and some awkward reflections)

Now, this is where I had to be inventive and I have no real recipe for you.  You need to make a pepper cream sauce.  I took two piquillo peppers, threw them in a food processor with about a half cup of light cream, seasoned with salt and pepper, and splashed in some lemon juice.  It worked perfectly, but you need to make sure the taste works well for you… it’ll seem a little thick, but when you bake it, the cream sauce mixes with some of the picadillo juice.  You really want to make sure it’s thick enough to withstand the thinning that will occur in the oven.

Completely improvised piquillo pepper cream sauce!

Then pour over the peppers in the dish and bake at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes (until the sauce is delicious and bubbly).

Baked stuffed piquillo peppers with cream sauce that photographs bright orange even though it's a pale coral in real life!

Serve with crusty bread (to mop up the sauce) and a light side salad!

Final product -- photographed terribly

I have two new resolutions since making this dinner:

1. Make stuffed piquillo peppers more often.
2. Learn how to photograph human food such that it doesn’t look like dog food.