Poblano Poppin…

Nothing starts a quarantine party like some stuffed poblanos! By the way, when I say party…I mean a stay at home dinner with my husband at 8PM instead of 7PM, we are WILD! No, we are SPICY…like these poppin’ peppers 🙂

We still had a lot of different peppers left over from our Mecca Family Farms produce haul last week. This dish had us use up the last of our poblanos amongst some other tasty goodies.

My husband and I wanted to make our staying indoors a little bit more interesting so we decided to do a poblano off!

SPOILER ALERT…it 100% was a tie. Both of our stuffed poblano poppers tasted SO good, there was no clear winner only clear deliciousness. With poblanos, we all are winners. Right?

We wanted this to be a competition

To start, we halved the poblanos lengthwise and cleaned out the seeds and ribs of the pepper.

We added some olive oil and salt to the peppers and placed them in a large cast iron skillet and roasted them at 400° for about 10-15 mins.

If you want mushier peppers, you can boil them first. This recipe made them a little bit more on the firm side and held up really well for all our stuffed fixings!

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Now for the fun

To be fair, we each made our OWN poblano stuffing concoction. I went first and cooked and stuffed my share of the pepper halves. I then topped my half of the peppers in the cast iron skillet with a piece of tinfoil just so my husband could not peak at my pepper pretties. Say that 5 times fast.

After that, I quickly cleaned my mess up, and tagged my husband up next. Once he made his stuffing, stuffed his poblanos, and cleaned up his mess, We put the skillet back into the 400° oven for another 10 mins or so.

We just had one person in the kitchen at a time so we could not get ideas off of each other. This was ALSO great for social distancing! 🙂

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I began my prep with immediately using leftovers.

We had pureed black beans with roasted chilies in the fridge so you KNOW I had to use that up. I went first on purpose so my husband would not think of that. I used the puree as the base for my poblano stuffing mixture to add another depth of smokey flavor.

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Then I Popped, Locked, and Dropped it.

Oops, I mean Chopped, Cooked, and Popped it…

I did a rough chop of a bunch of fresh veggies and then did a quick pulse in the food processor to make everything combine and become a finer texture. The poblanos were not huge so I wanted my filling to not overwhelm the pepper.

I used corn, cubanelle pepper, bell pepper, onion, jalapeño, and cilantro. I added fresh diced tomato after I pulsed the other veggies so I did not make my mixture too watery.

I simply sautéd the vegetables in a little bit of olive oil in a medium sized skillet just until tender. Then I added a couple glorious tablespoons of cream cheese and a sprinkle of taco seasoning, salt and pepper. Stirred, stirred, stirred. Stuffed, Stuffed, Stuffed. Then did the happy pepper dance.

The grand finale, finely shredded pepper jack on top. Poppers aren’t a party in your mouth without CHEESE.

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Unlike myself, my husband did not document his every move. But I can tell you what he did!

His process was short and sweet (like his wife). His base was a blend of bulgur, barley, quinoa, and red rice that only cooks in 10 minutes! It’s from Costco and it’s a pantry staple for us.

For some added flavor, instead of using water to boil the rice, he used bone broth.

As the rice mix was cooking, he browned up ground beef in a large sauté pan with olive oil, salt and pepper, and chopped up onions. When the rice and ground beef was done, he simply mixed those two bad boys together, stuffed his poblanos, topped with pepper jack cheese, and that’s all folks!

Although his dish seems a lot more simple, it was definitely still packed with flavor! Our poppers were just like us. Mine, a little bit of spicy chaos and his, simple and straight to the point. This popper challenge was a lot of fun!

It also was really delicious.

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Now go get your poblano popper party started!

As always, stay happy, stay healthy, stay full!