Get Stuffed

I curently do not have use of an oven. This can lead to inventiveness in cooking methods or sloppiness, where you just end up making slop.

I had some vague idea of Persian / Middle Eastern / North African food in my head when I did this.

I stuffed some green peppers and hollowed out aubergine with a mixture of
the aubergine flesh, crumbled firm tofu, garlic, a smidge of miso paste, harissa paste, mint, orange oil, vinegar, roughly chopped carrot, pine nuts, almonds, and the scooped out aubergine and minced ginger. I cooked them in a heavy bottomed pan which had been heated up with a bit of oil. Lid on pan. A Dutch oven. I
had to finish them off in the grill so that the stuffing would brown a little. I couldn't turn them over in the pan because the filling would have just fallen out.

I ate it with basmati rice which had lots of stuff in: fried some onions in oil with cardomom pods and cinnamon stick pieces in it. I added grated orange zest, almond slivers, garlic, saffron, vegetable stock, chopped dried apricots and raisins. Added ground cinnamon and ground cumin to the mix. Maybe if I had some pomegranate seeds, it might have become some kind of jewelled rice.

I was particularly pleased with the rice, because many flavours were presen without drowning each other out.

I like saffron. It tastes really weird, don't you think? It's almost like the antiseptic TCP but manages to claw its way back into your heart before you spit your food out.