I’m always on the hunt for new, healthy recipes. I was paging through Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood and happened upon a recipe for stuffed peppers…a pretty unhealthy looking one. Looking at it, I knew I could easily make some changes to make them healthy, and here’s the result! (Hers was also more of a Mexican flavored stuffed pepper and I made mine Italian!) It makes a lot of filling – I was overfilling the peppers and still had some leftover, so I may make less quinoa next time. You can definitely swap out the seasonings as needed and make it your own!
Stuffed Peppers
Serves 12
Ingredients:
- 6 bell peppers (whatever color you like), seeded and but in half lengthwise (top to bottom)
- 1 1/2 c. uncooked quinoa
- 2 lbs. raw ground turkey
- 1 cup diced onion
- 3 cloves garlic (although I felt I could’ve added more)
- 2 cans diced tomatoes (I used the ones with garlic and onion for more flavor)
- 8 oz. part-skim mozzarella cheese, shredded (or whatever italian cheeses you like)
- salt and pepper to taste
- italian seasoning to taste
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- In a saucepan, cook the quinoa according to package directions. If you have some leftover already cooked, you could use that as well. This makes about 3 cups of quinoa.
- In a skillet, saute the onion and garlic for 3-4 minutes, then add the ground turkey. Season with salt, pepper, and italian seasoning and brown through. Drain if needed (this depends on the fat content of the meat you buy).
- Add the cans of tomatoes to a saucepan and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer of 5 minutes. You can add additional seasoning here if you’d like. Remove from heat.
- In a large bowl, combine the quinoa, turkey, and tomatoes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and mix until blended.
- Place the bell peppers skin side down in a 13x9x2 pan (I ended up using another pan because they wouldn’t all fit in one). Divide the filling between the pepper halves.
- Cover the pan with foil and bake for 40 minutes.
- Remove the foil, sprinkle with the mozzarella cheese, and bake an additional 5 minutes, until the cheese melts.
Tips:
- If you want to lessen the time in the oven, wilt the peppers in boiling water for about 5 minutes – this reduces the initial baking time to about 15 minutes versus 40.
- I had a LOT of filling. Next time I’ll likely use only 1 cup of quinoa and 1-1 1/2 lbs. of ground turkey.
- This makes a lot of food, but it freezes well – in fact, I’m having one for lunch today!
- This was only 7 Weight Watchers points.
This was so filling and delicious! Definitely a keeper!
**adapted from Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood**
6 Responses
We love stuffed peppers!! These sound delicious 🙂
oh thanks i’m always looking for new quinoa recipes!
Omigosh, YUM! I wished Jason liked quinoa….I may just have to make these for myself!
Chris doesn’t really like quinoa either…but he was ok with it in these. Give it a try, he might surprise you 🙂
Hope you like it!
They are…too bad they wouldn’t hold up in the mail if I sent one to you….haha.