Stuffed summer vegetables are quintessential warm-weather food. Eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini make fine receptacles for all manner of appetizing fillings – as well as, in many cases, delicious filling ingredients themselves. Stuffed vegetables do require having the oven on, alas, but that’s a trade-off I can accept: I’ll bear the heat to get the treat.
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Above are my two latest stuffed vegetable discoveries, one for eggplants and one for Bell peppers. The recipes, both from Le Ricette della mia Cucina Romana, call for quite simple, meatless fillings. Here are the ingredients:
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(Please ignore that onion. There’s no onion in these recipes. I must have been thinking of something else when I assembled the veg.)
For making the cases, the peppers are just halved and seeded. The eggplants take a little additional preparation: the flesh is carved out and set aside, the shells are salted and left to give up some of their moisture.
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The stuffing for the peppers is a mixture of tuna, dry breadcrumbs, chopped olives, salt, pepper, and olive oil. For the eggplants, their pulp is first chopped and sautéed briefly in olive oil, then mixed with diced fontina, salt, and pepper.
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The fontina was one thing that sparked my interest in this recipe. In my experience, this cheese from the Alps in Italy’s Val’Aosta is extremely unusual in Roman cooking. Mozzarella or caciocavallo is what one would expect. And that wasn’t the only oddity in the recipe. The ingredient list includes pomodori maturi – ripe tomatoes – but the cooking directions say not a word about tomatoes. What was I to do with them? Well, in another Roman cookbook I found a stuffed eggplant recipe in which tomatoes are turned into a sauce and spooned onto the stuffing. I had some fresh tomato sauce in the refrigerator, so I used that.
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The baking dish went into a 400° oven until the vegetable cases were tender, which took about 40 minutes. The eggplants were actually done sooner, but it didn’t harm them to stay in there long enough for the peppers to soften.
Here they are again, cooked. Note that there isn’t a lot of stuffing. In the past whenever I’ve baked vegetables like these, I’ve packed in the stuffing and heaped it high. I was a little dubious about the modest amounts here, but they worked very well, though we felt that a little more good ventresca tuna would have been welcome in the peppers.
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When the filling dominates, the effect is that the base vegetable is merely an edible container. Here, pepper and eggplant were the main components, with each one’s stuffing being mostly a flavorful condiment. They were quite rich and filling, too. We had them hot, as a main dinner course, and found they got even better as they cooled. That being the case, they could very well be cooked in the cool of the morning and served later in the day. They’d also make good lunches and dinner antipasti.