Remember the poblano peppers I picked up from Mariquita Farms the day I went tomato picking? I’ve been waiting to put them to use, but this week has been so busy with work trips and workouts!  I finally had a bit of extra time to spend on dinner tonight, so I decided to make my version of a nutritious and simple chili relleno – no breading or heavy cheese and only one pan got dirty in the whole process. By literal definition, chili relleno means ‘stuffed chilli’, so I don’t think I ventured too far here.

I had just picked up my knives from getting sharpened, and the food geek in me was delighted to be chopping an onion. Check out the color of the carrots in the picture below – my dad brought home seeds from India during his last visit, and the red hue (which is typical in India) is just gorgeous. We have an abundance of these carrots in our garden right now.

Ingredients

• 1 tsp cumin
• red onion, chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and shredded
• 1 celery stalk, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• salt to taste
• chili peppers to taste
• can of rinsed black beans
• 1 cup cottage cheese (or crumbled tofu for a vegan option)
• fresh cilantro
• 4 poblano peppers

1. Heat up some oil in the pan and begin cooking a teaspoon of cumin.
2. Add the onion, carrot, celery and garlic into the pan.
3. Once the onions have softened, add the chili peppers along with the black beans, chili powder and salt.
4. Turn off the heat after cooking the mix and add the cottage cheese. My favourite brand of cottage cheese is Kalona – it is just the right amount of tartness and I love the consistency of the curds.  If you wanted to make this recipe vegan, crumbling some drained, extra firm tofu should work just as well (but you would want to cook this).  I also added in a small bunch of chopped cilantro at this point.
5. Wash and prep the poblano peppers – cut out the round stem from the top and cut a slit from to to bottom of the pepper.
6. Stuff the peppers with the filling. Make sure to use all the stuffing if you plan on using the same pan to cook the peppers.
   
7. Once the peppers are stuffed, place them slit side up in the pan to cook the bottom of the pepper. Once it has cooked well, wrap each pepper in some foil, and place them slit side down. Cover the pan and allowed the peppers to cook on low heat for another 10 to 15 minutes.

While the peppers cooked, it gave me enough time to clean up the kitchen and catch up on dishes, and also slice up some avocado. It may sound like this whole meal took a while to put together, but in reality, I was done from start to finish within 30 minutes (including kitchen cleaning time!).

I served the peppers with some salsa, avocado and some fresh limes. It was a very satisfying meal and can’t wait to try out different options in the stuffing to recreate this meal.