It sure has been a while! I have had a very busy week, with section meetings and, erm, “other” stuff (which I shall post in the near future) that basically meant lots of eating out and not being and home and, thus, little cooking.

Eventually, though, one has to go back to eating proper food at home. And so, here is the next little thing to add to the collection. We have a kind of red pepper in Spain called “Piquillo”, it’s a robust, tasty pepper that is very popular for a variety of dishes. It’s strongly flavoured, and the meat is “tough” (not tough as in chewy, but tough as in being able to take manipulation without falling apart). There are countless recipes for how to make stuffed Piquillo peppers, and here is but one of them.

In no particular order:

• Pot/tin of roasted red peppers, whole.
• Onion(s).
• Garlic.
• Prawns.
• Milk.
• Flour.
• Butter.
• Pepper.
• Nutmeg.
• Tomato puree/chunks.

So, to start with we’ll cook the prawns. Start by chopping up an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, then fry gently in a pan with a bit of oil. Let the onion go a bit soft, then add the chopped-up prawns.

Fry until the prawns have first released most of the water, then the water has been mostly consumed. Prawns tend to cook fast!

Now, the second step is to make a Bechamel sauce. You can even use the same pan. First chop up a bit of onion (I used an extra half), and put it in the pan with some butter/margarine. Give it a gentle fry.

When the onion’s mostly ready, add a couple of spoonfuls of flour, give it a quick stir, so that you toast it a bit. Don’t let it burn!

Afterwards, it’s a matter of adding the milk, and stirring constantly to make sure you leave no flour lumps. Add the nutmeg and pepper at this point, and salt if you want too.

In the meantime, I am making a simple creamy tomato sauce to add to the peppers later on. In a pot, fry the tomato puree/chunks on mid heat, stir every so often, and when it’s mostly done, add a bit of cream, or milk, or both, or even some Bechamel sauce. It’s up to you, I used cream.

When the Bechamel is looking halfway done – starting to feel thick -, add the mix of fried onion/prawns to it, and now stir and stir and stir more so that it won’t burn, it’ll reduce, and it’ll be homogeneous.

Now for the final touch, you cover them with the sauce (you can put it through the blender/processor if you want to make it smooth, I left it chunky as I like chunky vegetables… As I think I’ve mentioned already), and throw them in the oven, 200°C for 5-10 minutes.

Serve hot, don’t be stringy with the sauce, and let it roast a bit nicely.

There are countless variations, use your imagination! Mushrooms go well, you can have prawns + fish too (Monk Fish or Cod work well), a very popular one in Spain is calamari, usually with a dark sauce with squid-ink. You can vary the stuffing and the sauce, it’s a flexible dish!