Stuffed Bell Peppers!

As much as I love my mum's Chinese home-cooked food (I'm a Malaysian of 100% Chinese descent, duh), my curiosity always gets the better of me. This time, I want a stuffed vegetable, not vegetable in soups and stir-fries, which led on to me Googling "stuffed bell peppers"...

And I made my stuffed bell pepper using half of this recipe since I am the only weirdo in my family who loves to experiment with wacky combinations (stuffed peppers are considered wacky in my family) and am doomed to finish the entire dish. Well, at least I can make my taste buds to travel around the globe (hopefully) since I cannot afford to even travel on an airplane yet!

This must be really,really weird since none in my family has ever seen a stuffed pepper in his/her life...

This is the stuffed bell pepper from Gourmandelle, a bilingual vegetarian blog from Romania.

Looks beautiful, right? The ingredients are not too expensive and have some of my favourite vegetables(carrot, tomato, bell pepper, mushrooms). The instructions looked easy too, so I gave it a try.

I anticipated only three peppers since I used half of the recipe. As it turned out, I had to go through ALL the bell peppers in the refrigerator because the peppers were tiny. Sorry mom, I think I kind of ruined your precious peppers from Cameron Highlands...

The preparation process was of course, easy, otherwise I would not have tried it at the first place. I could not find any paprika so I used curry powder, and used dried parsley instead of the nonexistent coriander (What the hell am I doing?) The stuffing turned out pretty well except that it cooked quickly.

Here comes the hell of the entire process... stuffing the peppers. The recipe instructed me to stuff each pepper with 2 tablespoons of stuffing but I ended up with heaps of leftovers. Luckily two of the bell peppers were large enough to contain the extra stuffing. I then covered the stuffed peppers with tomatoes and cooked them in a pot for half an hour.

Here are my peppers... 

My heart sank. The large peppers were those which cracked and I had a hard time scooping them out. Miraculously, the small peppers kept their shape. This made me baffled. 

Here comes the taste test:

The pepper actually tasted good, not really mind-blowing but, still, good, except that the rice was undercooked. I would give my recreation of the dish 5/10 due to the undercooked rice.

Overall, I am going to try this dish again but with some tweaks:

• Soak the rice for three hours before cooking
• Cut off slightly around the tip of the pepper, not the entire top

This is my first time attempting this. No try, no knowledge, no experience, nothing to learn! Oh well,when it comes to learning, go big or go home.