Thanks for putting up with my crankiness all week long – you guys are troopers!  I promise the pity party is over now, and we can resume our regularly scheduled programming.  I think it’s high time we get back to fun things like close-ups of food and talking about peanut butter addictions.  Shall we?

You know that website texts from last night?  I’m starting to feel like my blog is becoming “food from last night.”  With all the homework I’ve had for my current class class, plus other crazy projects and things as graduation draws closer, I haven’t had time to get my early morning posts up recently.  Instead I’ve had to post last night’s fun dinners the following afternoon.  But you guys don’t care, right?  While everyone else is posting lunch, I’m posting dinner and mixing it up a little.  Just trying to keep you on your toes.  :) 

Here we go with food from last night…

Curried Millet and Chickpea Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:  (makes 4 stuffed peppers)

• 1 cup dry millet
• 3 cups water
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp curry powder
• 1 can chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
• 1/4 cup raisins
• 4 bell peppers

To Prepare:  Start by toasting the millet in a sauce pan, giving it a really great nutty corn-like taste, and also helps it to hold its shape better.  Once the millet is toasted, add 3 cups water, cover, and simmer for 20-ish minutes – or until all the water has been absorbed.  While the millet simmers, grab a large non-stick sauté pan to cook the rest of the filling.  Add a little bit of olive oil to your hot pan, and sauté the onions, carrots, and garlic until they are soft – about 10 minutes or so.  Once soft, add the curry powder and chickpeas.  Cook for another minute or 2, until everything is heated through.

Go ahead and prep your peppers now too.  For this recipe, I tried stuffing my peppers lengthwise instead of just cutting the caps off and filling the peppers whole.  I found that they were easier to eat, and I think it helped the peppers cook more evenly too! 

I laid the peppers in a glass baking dish with a bit of water added – just enough to cover the bottom.  The last time we had stuffed peppers, I thought that the stuffing was good, but the peppers themselves were somewhat bland.  In order to avoid that this time, I drizzled a little bit of olive oil and added salt and pepper directly to the peppers before stuffing.  This made a HUGE difference!

Once the millet was cooked, I added the chickpea mixture and stirred it all up to combine.

And then I remembered how much I like raisins with curry dishes and Indian food, so I tossed those in too…

Last step – stuffing the peppers!  I put a hefty scoop into each half.  I think this method of slicing the peppers rather than stuffing them whole also gives a better stuffing to pepper ratio.  And it also creates my personal favorite illusion of what LOOKS like a ton of food but really isn’t – love that. 

Packed the filling in and t
hrew the baking dish into a 400 degree oven for about 3o minutes…

Holy raisins – they turned into GRAPES!  How scary!  Grapes or not, they sure tasted good…

Three delicious peppers all for me, with a colorful arugula side salad…

The flavor combination of millet, chickpeas, and curry was awesome – a definite success!  In hindsight, if I made this again I would probably try cooking the millet in some light coconut milk to see if it would add an additional complimenting flavor.  But sadly I didn’t think of this until I was eating it!  No worries though – coconut milk or not, there was plenty of flavor.

On the side – colorful salad of arugula, mixed cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers with a nutritional yeast vinaigrette dressing…

In my favorite Crate and Barrel wooden salad bowls…

And before I go, one more bonus recipe –  just because I love you guys.

Nutritional Yeast Vinaigrette Dressing

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast flakes
• 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1.5 tsp hemp oil (or other oil)

To Prepare:  Shake (or stir!) and pour over salad…

EAT and enjoy!  :)