Peppers & Tacos: 2-for-1 Recipe

Good morning lovely blog friends! Hopefully we've all recovered by now from our long weekends. I know yesterday was still kinda rough for me, being that it was a Monday, and the first day back from a long holiday. But I feel a little better today and I'm ready to get this thing going! Yesterday, I shared a picture of the stuffed peppers we made last week, and today I'm sharing the simple and yummy recipe! Well actually, this is a double-feature recipe post, so make sure you see the super simple twist for using the leftovers as well the next day :)

Ingredients
4 green or red bell peppers
1 pound lean ground turkey
2 tablespoons Olive Oil
2 cloves of garlic, diced pretty small (or minced if you want)
1/2 medium sized onion, diced
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can whole kernel corn, rinsed and drained
diced tomatoes (quantity depends on how much you like them!)
generous shakes of taco seasoning (sorry folks, I didn't actually measure this, but maybe 1 or 2 tbsp.)
1 teaspoon cumin
salt and pepper
Cheese and sour cream for later...

Directions
Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees. Heat olive oil in large skillet over medium high heat, add turkey, garlic, onion, cumin, taco seasoning and salt and pepper - cook until the meat is all brown with no pink. Turkey is usually not greasy, so you should not need to drain it. (It's OK if there is a little bit of liquid, because it will be absorbed later.) Once it's completely cooked, add in corn and black beans, and let simmer for about five minutes, then add diced tomatoes and simmer a few more minutes.

Since there were two of us cooking, I did this next part while Jeff was cooking the meat, but you can do it whenever you can fit it in, or before or after you've made the meat mixture. Cut the tops off of the peppers, and scrape out the stem and seeds. Then cut each pepper in half, to create two equal sides. Line them all in a baking dish, open sides facing up. Scoop as much of the mixture into each half pepper as you can fit. Put a tiny bit of water in the bottom of the dish, so that they're juuuust barely sitting in water. Cover the whole thing with aluminum foil, and bake for 30 minutes, or until peppers are soft.

Remove the foil, sprinkle cheese on top of each one, and bake for an additional 5 minutes uncovered to melt the cheese. We used the mixed shredded colby and jack cheese, and it was delish. Serve with a dollop of fat free sour cream on top, and some Spanish rice on the side, and you're all ready to go!

These were sooo super yummy, and we both liked them a lot. Jeff was actually a little skeptical of the idea of stuffed peppers at first, but even he loved them! This made a lot of the meat mixture, so we had tons leftover, even after us both eating a little scoop of just the mix as well. So the next day, we heated it back up in the skillet (add in a tiny bit of water and some more seasoning to re-flavor and keep from drying up too much), and then scooped the mixture onto lettuce leaves, to make Santa Fe Turkey Taco Lettuce Wraps. Soooo good as well. Again, add cheese and sour cream on top, and I added more fresh tomato on mine. Yum! Then just roll the lettuce up like a taco.

Both ways, this meat mixture is really good - in both the baked peppers, and wrapped up like healthy tacos. If you like spicy food, feel free to add in some jalapeno peppers or a little bit of red pepper flakes into the meat mixture while it's simmering, and that would be really good too. (Jeff can't handle super spicy stuff, or else I would have spiced ours up a bit because we both love the taste of spicy stuff - it's just too hard on his stomach sometimes.) I definitely recommend you try this out though, and let me know how it turns out for you!

Much Love,
Halie