Peppers With Stuff In

One thing I enjoy is making food out of things at hand. Luckily our cupboards are brimming with weird tins of things like giant beans, snails, olives, nori seaweed, capers and bamboo shoots. Draws full of sheets of rice paper, chickpeas, prawn crackers, lentils and more spices than a Moroccan bazaar. Our fridge, however, is more often than not some sort of cold last chance saloon for things Mrs B brings back from her lunch at work, bits of cheese which have left the “nicely ripe” stage a while back and are hurtling towards Toxic Town, vegetables which seem to be having babies, jars of chutneys and sauces where the sell-by dates go back to the last millennium and, at the back, things wrapped in tin foil which I daren’t open. Actually maybe it should be better to call it a beer fridge with alien elements. Mmm I like that.

I rather envy that bloke Nigel La Lawson who has a spotless fridge full of fresh clean looking produce, all wrapped up in straight-from-the-deli parchment. Ah well, at least I don’t have to wear a corset. One back-of-the-fridge, rather rusty tin I came across not too long ago contained a big block of sheep’s feta and the barely distinguishable sell-by date was still to become history which was a very pleasant surprise. I decided to use it for a side dish that had seeded in my mind when we found a big bag of mini red peppers at the cash & carry. This is not an Oh My God How Original dish but it turned out very well for a big buffet thingy we threw for Big Daughter’s confirmation during the summer. My pet brother-in-law Brian seems to like it, too. And if mini red peppers aren’t available (and they don’t exactly grow on trees – plants, but not trees) then normal peppers sliced into quarters lengthways do the trick.

All the other ingredients were hanging around waiting to die so I dedicate this dish to the Eleanor Rigbys of Kitchenland.

Stuffed Red Peppers

Some red peppers
Some feta cheese
Some capers
Some anchovies
Some olive oil
Some garlic
Some pepper

The observant types may well observe the lack of specific amounts and quantities in the above recipe (does it even qualify as a recipe when it’s so vague?) But this is because one can mix it to ones own particular taste depending on one's love of anchovies and capers.

Well, one takes ones peppers and one tops them. Then one removes the seeds and pith (and one quarters them if using grown-up peppers). Then one puts crumbled or cubed feta, capers, chopped anchovy filets, pepper, crushed garlic and generous splooge of olive oil into a mixing bowl and one mixes it with a wooden spoon or the like. It’s good to mash it a bit which releases the flavours of the anchovies and capers as well as breaks down the feta. Then one fills ones peppers, puts 'em into a dish, drizzles 'em with a little oil and bungs 'em in tut oven at 181.5 or so degrees shellfish (385.7 or so degrees barronknight) for twentyish minutes or until they’re nice and soft (but not nice and soft and black).

One can, if one is in one’s pernickety corner, save the tops of one’s mini peppers and replace them after filling. This, as I discovered as I attempted to fill about 60 of the buggers, is a tedious chore as one a) has to replace the right top that belongs to the right body and b) it has to be fitted correctly to, erm, fit correctly. And even then (and after securing them with a toothpick) some fell off after roasting.