green peppers + goat cheese

I love this social media stuff. I know you come to my blog for ideas and inspiration. But when I’m stumped, all I have to do is post on Facebook or Tweet a question and within seconds I’ve got answers, ideas and suggestions. Thank you all!

Example: A few weeks ago I was swimming in an over-abundance of green peppers from our garden in Todi. Back in May Domenico decided to buy about 10 plants of frigitelli, a small sweet green pepper. And of course they all became super productive at exactly the same time in October. After preparing the tender peppers the traditional Roman way – fried in hot oil – as well as using them to make pollo con peperoni  and stuffed with bread crumbs, I was in the mood for something a bit different.

Among the many suggestions I got, ‘stuff them with goat cheese’ stuck in my mind.

So here they are, ‘stuffed with goat cheese’.

The  friend on Facebook didn’t actually link to  a recipe, so I had to wing it. Luckily Domenico had just come back from a trip to the Marche where he is working on two architectural renovations, and  stopped at Beltrami where he picked up a few kinds of goat cheese. He actually bought about 3 kilos of different kinds of cheeses. All delicious (Beltrami is one of the best cheese sources in in Italy) but way too much to eat our way through .Domenico is great with measuring things like roof tiles and beams, but kind of over does it on the food front. So I was looking for ways to work them into recipes.

Some of the goat cheese was freshly soft, and some aged and hard. The soft cheese got mashed up, the hard cheese was grated and both got mixed with a good helping of buffalo milk ricotta I had picked up from the store in Orte.

The process of stuffing was a lot less fiddly than I had anticipated. Once I got going – with a small spoon and a big finger – the cheese slid into each pepper pretty nicely.

A drizzle of olive oil and 25 minutes in the oven and that was lunch.

FYI, the pepper season chez Minchilli has finally come to an end. But I’m sure we’ll be planting way too many next year too. So leave a comment, suggest away. What do you do with your peppers?

Goat Cheese-Stuffed Peppers

I used the small green peppers, called Frigitelli in Italian. These work well for this recipe since they have thin skin and the flesh is not that watery. You don’t want to use huge bell peppers for this recipe, since you’d get way too much cheese per pepper.

15-20  Frigitelli
1 cup soft goat cheese
3 tablespoons grated sharp goats cheese (or parmesan)
1/4 cup ricotta
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 tsp salt, plus more for each pepper
1/2 tsp pepper
1 Tablespoon olive oil, plus more

Preheat oven to 350F/ 185C

Mash up the goat cheese with a fork, and mix in the grated cheese and ricotta. Mix in a bit of milk to make it creamy. Add salt, pepper and olive oil, mixing well.

To prepare peppers, cut off the top third of each pepper, lengthwise. (see photo) You want them to be like little boats, with the stem still attached.

Sprinkle a bit of salt in each pepper.

Using a small spoon, or butter knife and your finger, stuff each pepper. Place peppers in one layer on an oven tray. Drizzle with olive oil and place in upper third of oven for about 25 minutes.

Peppers should be soft and cooked through, and cheese should be golden.