An appetizer so good, it should be dinner
When you’re invited to a friend’s house for dinner, it’s impolite to gobble so many of the hors d’oeuvre that you have no room for the rest of the meal.
But the stuffed, roasted mini sweet peppers that my friend Meline Toumani made were so ridiculously tasty that I just didn’t have the will to resist.
So I didn’t, and emptied the plate at the expense of the grilled lamb main course.
The peppers were caramelized and fleshy, and slicked with good olive oil. Inside, they were crammed with cumin-spiced, tomato-spiked bulgur studded with flakes of good tuna and herbs. Perfectly balanced between sweet from the peppers and savoury from the tuna, they were all anyone could ever want from a stuffed vegetable.
Not only didn’t Meline mind my excessive enthusiasm for her peppers, she even offered me the recipe. My only tweak was to add a spoonful of capers to add tangy bursts to the mild bulgur grains.
This wasn’t traditional. But neither was Meline’s recipe, which is her riff on a Turkish dish of dried pepper or baby eggplant dolmas, in which the dried vegetables are rehydrated in boiling water, then stuffed with a mix of highly seasoned rice or bulgur and sometimes meat.
For Meline’s recipe, the fresh peppers are roasted until they collapse in on themselves in an autumnal-hued heap.
This dish is prettiest if you can get mini sweet peppers in a variety of colours — yellow, orange and red, which is how they are generally sold in bags at the supermarket. If you’re shopping at a farmers’ market, you might find some green and purple ones, too.
After roasting, you’ll need to stuff each pepper individually. It seems like a lot of work, but it goes quickly. Slice open the peppers, then use your fingers to add the bulgur and close them up — as opposed to trying to spoon filling into the cavities. Don’t worry about the peppers falling open on the plate; the bulgur filling binds them together.
This sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Suffice it to say, you can make these in under an hour.
Meline offered the stuffed peppers to us as a nibble with wine. But I could also see serving them with a big salad and some warm flatbread for a light supper. In which case, it wouldn’t be at all rude to clean your plate.