Jackson Free Press

I grew up in a survival-of-the-fittest (or survival of who-knew-how-to-cook) atmosphere. Even though my mom was a stay-at-home type, she wasn't the have-dinner-on-the-table-by-5:30 type. My siblings and I soon learned that if we were hungry, we might just have to get into the kitchen and fire up the skillet.

Some nights, my dad would take over the dinner responsibilities. He was a master of discovering dinner in an empty fridge. Some ground beef out of the freezer, a few chopped onions and mushrooms, a couple of cups of rice, and voila! Dinner was served.

I don't exactly remember the first time we made stuffed bell peppers. It was probably a dad dinner-night though, which meant he took whatever he could find, cooked it up and put it all into some bell peppers.

Of course, it could have been that we were all out of dishes that night. That happened occasionally—OK, probably once a week. I always knew we had run out of dishes when my dad used a soup pan for a drinking glass.

The other day, when my husband and I made stuffed peppers, I felt sophisticated to be eating out of a pepper bowl. These days, it seems that the more sophisticated you are, the less likely you are to use a real bowl. Instead, you eat your lemon sorbet out of a melon and your chicken pistachio salad out of a lettuce cup. Of course, it could be that the cognoscenti just figured something out that could help the rest of us: If you eat your dinner and your dinnerware, you'll spend less time washing dishes and more time feeling chic.

Bowls, chic or not, have been around for thousands of years. It also seems that the materials used to make the bowls—pottery, wood, metal, pewter and even animal skulls—are as diverse as what was put into them. When and where bell peppers came into the bowl scene is uncertain, but I imagine some little caveman family was hungry, and mom didn't feel like cooking. Maybe all their sloth-skull bowls were dirty, and dad got the brilliant idea of serving his recent kill of mammoth meat in a green pepper. I have no formal training in paleontology, but I'm pretty sure this is how it went down.

Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered bell peppers in the New World and introduced them to Europe. It seems that not too long after, our friend the stuffed pepper became quite the globetrotter. Versions of stuffed peppers have been served at tables throughout the world, including Greece, Israel, Spain, South Western United States, China and Italy.

The versatility of stuffed peppers make them appealing to all peoples and nations.

STUFFED PEPPERS
1 pound ground beef or turkey
1 medium chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, diced
Salt and pepper
2-3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 cups cooked rice
1 small can of tomato sauce
Shredded cheese
4 large green or red peppers

Cook the ground beef, onions and garlic in a skillet. Add salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce to
taste.

Meanwhile, wash the peppers and cut the tops off. Carefully scoop out the seeds and membrane. Boil
peppers in large pot for about 10 minutes. Remove them from the pot and drain all the water.

Mix cooked meat, rice, and tomato sauce together. Scoop mixture into the boiled peppers. Bake in 350° oven for 20-25 minutes. Top with grated cheese and bake for another 5-10 minutes.