Stuffed

After you’ve driven in the rain for five hours and reached a vacation site so fog-shrouded it’s hard to tell if you might sail off the edge of the world, you order take-out.

You might do this even if the drive is completely sunny and the beach looks perfect, but I wouldn’t know. I’m new to this seaside-vacation thing.

Either way, you order too much take-out. Not that there really is such a thing as “too much,” but certainly too much for dinner on a driving day. So there are leftovers. And, aside from pizza (which can be perfectly good eaten cold on the beach with chocolate milk), leftovers are meant to be transformed.

This is especially the case if one of your party has dietary restrictions and what was ordered can best be described as Sometime Food.

Thus it was that, as Improviser-in-Chief, I removed packages from the fridge and found partial orders of boneless spare ribs, teriyaki beef kebabs, bourbon chicken, and way more fried rice than should be served to anybody with diabetes and cardiac concerns. So I also removed four bell peppers, a couple of carrots (with their greens still attached), a couple ribs of celery, and a bunch of chard. From the basket in the kitchen’s bay window, I took a handful of grape tomatoes, a red onion, and a head of garlic. I set the oven to 350F, put a big saute pan on the stove, a big cutting board on the counter, and got to work.

I sliced off the tops of the bell peppers and set the bodies in a baking dish. I discarded the seeds, ribs, and stems, and chopped the tops. The chopped bits, along with the celery (diced), red onion (diced), garlic (2 cloves, minced), and chard (stemmed and chopped) were salted and sauteed briefly in olive oil, then put in a big mixing bowl.

Meanwhile, I scooped the chicken, ribs, and beef out of their containers and scraped off as much sauce as I could without making a full day’s project of it, then diced them all, and then gave them a turn in the saute pan, then added them to the big bowl.

Finally, the fried rice and tomatoes went in; when the rice started to get a little sticky, I added a little balsamic vinegar and a glug of the red wine I’d opened to serve with dinner; the object here was just to say “Hey, this isn’t Chinese food any more.” Into the bowl it went with everything else.

My smart leggy brunette sous-chef stirred everything together and then spooned the stuffing into the peppers. And, I might add, she did so far more neatly than I would have managed. I crushed some cracked-wheat crackers and topped the peppers with them. (She also swept up the cracker-crushings that went all over the kitchen floor.) I added some aluminum foil bolsters so the peppers wouldn’t fall over, covered the dish with foil, and set it in the oven.

While the peppers baked, I minced the carrot tops with some savory from the CSA box (I would have used parsley if we’d had any), and sprinkled them with a few drops of vinegar.

After 15 minutes, I removed the foil from the peppers, and after 15 more minutes realized the peppers needed another five. When the peppers were mostly tender, I plated the peppers, ringed with the stuffing that hadn’t fit inside, and garnished with the greens.

My sainted grandmother made stuffed peppers for dinner pretty regularly: bell peppers stuffed with a mixture of ground beef and rice, topped with stewed tomatoes and seasoned with nothing more than a little salt. Bless her soul, they were bland and mushy. These were crisp, full of vegetables, and, well, interesting. They weren’t candy-sweet, they weren’t OMG-the-MSG salty, and if I hadn’t known their origins as Chinese takeout I’m not sure I would have guessed.

I would not suggest that this meal was worth driving five hours in the rain for, but let’s put it this way: there were no leftovers.