Stuffed Peppers with Cheese
This is an even easier and faster recipe! Once again, you can use this same stuffing to fill a variety of vegetables. You have many options regarding what kind of cheese you use in the stuffing. You can use white feta cheese; Bulgarian, Greek, French, and Turkish styles of feta will all work. I will add extra ricotta and salt to the stuffing if I don’t have any feta cheese. Instead of the caciocavallo cheese, you can use cheddar or Parmesan cheese. There is also another kind of popular Albanian cheese, called gjizë, that you can use. This cheese is commonly used to fill bureks and peppers, and it tastes similar to ricotta or cottage cheese.
Ingredients:
- 6–8 peppers
- 1 cup ricotta cheese
- 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
- ½ cup caciocavallo cheese
- 1 egg
- ¼ bread crumbs
- 3 T olive oil
- 1 T fresh or dry herbs (some popular herbs for this stuffing are oregano, parsley, and marjoram)
- 1 t crushed garlic
- Salt and pepper to taste (be careful adding salt because the cheese is salty, so you want to skip adding salt altogether)
Directions:
- Wash and dry the peppers and remove their tops. Discard the seeds, but keep the tops to cover the stuffed peppers, if you would like. Place the peppers in a well-oiled baking dish. The baking dish you use can be a nice one that you can serve the finished peppers directly out of, or, if you’re using the peppers as appetizers and re-plating them, then any baking pan will do.
- Set aside half of the breadcrumbs and olive oil. Mix all of the remaining ingredients together. Fill the peppers one-by-one with the mixture and arrange them in rows in the baking dish. Sprinkle the tops with the remaining breadcrumbs and olive oil.
- Bake in a 375°F oven for around 35 minutes, or until the tops are golden and the peppers are tender but still maintain their original shape.
- Let the peppers cool and then serve them either as a main dish with rice or as an appetizer.
