Emma’s food annoyances: stuffed vegetables
I eat often, a lot and with great pleasure, and then I regularly notice things. Often they’re positive things, but it also frequently happens that something irritates me immensely. Whether that’s justified or not, sometimes I need to vent. Hence this column: Emma’s food annoyances, featuring this week a retro classic: stuffed vegetables.
I have nothing against old-fashioned food—in fact, quite the opposite. An old-school garlic bread, a drinks platter with liver sausage and cubes of cheese, a puff pastry shell with ragout: they make me blissfully happy. But why do people keep stuffing peppers and courgettes? Surely this trend from the ’70s should have blown over by now?
Asking for trouble
If you think about it carefully, stuffing a pepper with meat or rice and baking it whole in the oven is asking for trouble. A pepper becomes delicious when you roast it, preferably at as high a temperature as possible. The rice or mince you put inside the hollowed-out pepper is better cooked low and slow. If you bake that at too high a temperature, it becomes bone-dry and, if you’re a little unlucky, pitch-black. So it’s basically mission impossible to cook both ingredients in the best possible way, which means you always end up with a bland, uninspired bite. Why not simply serve the ‘filling’ alongside a properly prepared pepper?
A little lid
Someone probably came up with this because it looked nice on the plate, but surely in 2018 we can no longer pretend that’s the case? It actually looks ridiculous! Worst of all is when the top of the tomato/pepper/courgette is cut off and placed back on after stuffing, as if it were a little lid. Why?? In short: stuffed vegetables are completely unnecessary and don’t look appealing. A bit like soup served in a bread bowl.
Read also:
- Delivery review: De Kas’s takeaway meal
- This is the best vegetable restaurant in the world
- How to prepare vegetables like a chef
