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Weekend Dining Happiness

September 29, 2008 – 12:12 pm

Our friends E and J, and hubs and I, decided on Saturday that a feast was in order. So we pooled our resources to make a couple of new-for-us recipes from Vcon.

Enter, Creole Stuffed Peppers. E had peppers from their garden, so we stuffed them full of this veggie-heavy-black-eyed-pea stuffing. Now, Terry and Isa admit in the cookbook that they don’t know much about Southern cooking except what they learned on Food Network; but I happen to know a lot about Southern cooking, particularly Creole, and I know that no Creole Stuffed Pepper is complete without cayenne pepper and sausage. Field Roast’s Mexican Chipotle Sausage filled the role nicely — we chopped up two links and added them to the stuffing, along with a generous dash of Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning (no Southern kitchen is complete without this seasoning blend from my mom’s hometown of Opelousas, LA. Pronounced SA-sher-ee). The peppers were fresh and lovely, although next time I will skip the boiling step as it seemed unnecessary, and the stuffing was spicy and savory.

Hubs doesn’t like peppers, so he just ate the stuffing. Isa and Terry suggest pairing the peppers with mashed potatoes or Messy Rice, and if you want to be authentic, you should choose the rice, cause that’s how we roll in Loosiana. (I haven’t made their Messy Rice recipe, so no comment there.) But, we opted for a log of polenta, sliced about 1/2 in thick and baked till slightly crispy, smothered in the Jalapeno Corn Gravy – yum. Every sauce I have made out of Vcon has been excellent. I am doing a repeat of Mustard Sauce later today.

For dessert, E had made the key lime version of Stacey’s Chocolate Cheese Cake, made with avocado, which was so good that we altogether ate 3/4 of it in one sitting. Add a coupla margaritas to the mix, and we four were clam-happy.