Mexican Style Quinoa and Black Bean Stuffed Peppers, Gluten Free and Vegan

This month, something was brought to my attention that just made October so much cooler. October is Vegetarian Awareness Month!! For those of you who don’t know me, I love October. And when I say love, I mean LOVE LOVE LOVE. My birthday is in October, thanksgiving, my dogs birthdays and Halloween! Now this just puts the cherry right on top!
One of the main messages that Vegetarian Awareness Month is promoting is Meatless Monday’s. This is where you go all of Monday without eating any meat. I know for those of you who are meat eaters, it sounds hard, but I swear it isn’t. I even bet some of your favourite meals are vegetarian. When you actually start looking for amazing meatless meals, you will find that the options are endless.

Some simple ideas can include:

Taking your favourite Fettuccini Alfredo and instead of adding meat, add mushrooms
Vegetarian Pizza – You could do a mushroom, peppers, tomato, olives, ect. There are a lot of ingredients that go really well on a pizza. Now is the time to be creative.
Do breakfast for supper! Who doesn’t love pancakes for supper? Pair those with some scrambled eggs or omelets and you got a great meal!

Last night for supper I was in the mood for something Mexican inspired. So I checked the fridge and I was in luck, I had red and yellow peppers! And one of my favourite dishes to make is quinoa stuffed peppers. They are quite simple to make, and if you want you can do any flavour of stuffed peppers, such as Italian or Greek.

Ingredients2 yellow peppers
1 cup of cooked quinoa
1 tbsp of coconut oil

1 medium onion, diced

1 cup of zucchini, diced
1 ½ cups of mushrooms, diced
1 medium tomato, diced
1 cup of black beans

1/4 cup of Daiya Cheese
1 tsp of cumin
1 tsp of coriander
2 tsp of chili powder
1 tsp of onion salt

 

Pre heat your oven to 350 degrees and heat up oil in a medium sized frying pan on Medium/High heat. Add the onions and garlic and sauté them for 10 minutes, or until they are soft. Stir in your mushrooms, zucchini and tomatoes until evenly distributed, sauté for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium and add your spices, mixing them well into the vegetables. Finally stir in the quinoa and black beans. Continue to cook on low/medium heat for another 5 minutes.

Then take the peppers and cut them in half length wise. This will make them easier to stuff, they will lay more evenly in the pan and they are easier to eat. If your peppers are odd shaped and do not stay upright in the pan, stick toothpicks in the sides of the pepper to stabilize them.

Once your vegetable mix is ready, place your peppers in a baking pan – I used an 8 inch square cake pan. Then spoon the mixture into the peppers, almost to the point of over stuffing them.

This is the point when I remembered that I had just bought a new package of Pepper Jack Daiya Cheese. I love this stuff, it melts like cheese, tastes like cheese and would be the perfect touch to my stuffed peppers.

I took about ¼ cup of the cheese and evenly distributed it on top of the peppers. This is one of the reasons why you should make sure your peppers lay flat in the pan. Because if they didn’t your stuffing and cheese would fall out.

Now they are ready to put in the oven! Now because the inside veggie mixture is already cooked, the bake time isn’t very long. We are only baking the peppers until they are soft, which takes about 15-20 minutes or until the cheese melts. This step is really up to you, the longer you have it in the oven, the softer the pepper. I like my pepper to be a little crunchy, so I only bake it for 15 minutes.

Once your peppers are cooked to your liking, take them out of the oven and let them cool for 5 minutes. Then serve!





Thanks for reading!!

xoxo -N