Jen McConnell
Stuffed Peppers to Please Everybody
Ingredients
8 peppers, hollowed out and blanched. Reserve tops.
2 pounds ground beef, browned like your skin on the last day of vacation, and drained.
4 cups white rice, cooked with extra water so it’s really soft or your mother will call you out.
2 big cans of tomato sauce. Not the generic brand; the cans that are red like the color of blood.
Sugar, to taste. Your father in-law will say, “What is this, dessert?” but your parents won’t eat it otherwise.
2 cloves garlic, diced.
Onion, powdered or diced. Your mother-in-law doesn’t like shortcuts, but you hate cutting onions; there’s no feeling of relief from fabricated tears.
Pepper tops, diced and sautéed with garlic and onion/powder.
Spices, to taste: hot Hungarian paprika, smoked Hungarian paprika, sweet Hungarian paprika, salt, and pepper.
1½ cups cheese. Your mother likes mild Monterey Jack. Your father-in-law doesn’t want any cheese, just a dollop of sour cream. Your dad and mother-in-law don’t have a preference. Your husband doesn’t know anything about cheese so you use what you like, sharp cheddar.
Directions:
Mix the stuffing ingredients, fill the cooked peppers, and top with cheese. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Serve with three bottles of wine: a chilled sweet white wine for your mother, a Hungarian red called Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood) for your father-in-law and husband, and a robust pinot noir for you and your dad. You’ll drink most of the pinot yourself and flush as red as an unsweetened tomato when your parents begin suggesting names for grandchildren.
Chef’s Notes:
1) After two years of dating, you traveled with your future husband to a small town outside Budapest to meet his extended family. You hoped he would propose during the trip, somewhere romantic, like on a bridge over the Danube that was the site of a historic battle. But for most of the trip, you sat by yourself reading a book while he spoke half English, half Hungarian to his relatives.
2) The first time you ate Hungarian food was also your first time experiencing heartburn. His great aunt’s stuffed peppers weren’t hot exactly. Just a slow burn that grew worse after you finished eating.
3) As the two of you walked a mile to a pharmacy for antiacids, you spied a bridge in the distance. You asked your boyfriend if anything important happened there. He gestured at the bridge, the town, and the fields, and said there wasn’t much of that land that hadn’t been soaked in blood at one time or another.
Jen McConnell is a fiction author and poet, with work published in more than forty national and international literary magazines and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first short story collection, Welcome, Anybody, was published by Press 53 and she's finishing another. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Read more at jenmcconnell.com.
