Paved with Good Intentions

This blog should really end up being a confessional.

Because despite my good intentions, I still end up getting lattes in disposable cups, I only made it one day so far on natural deodorant, and it is already June 17 and I have cooked from scratch exactly 2 times.

One of those two cooking extravaganzas was on Wednesday, and it reminded me of why I so very rarely cook completely from scratch. It is a huge pain in the butt. It took me over two hours, not including the overnight soaking of the black beans, and I dirtied 3 pots + 3 lids, one baking dish, one big storage container for the beans, 2 colanders, a cutting board and 2 knives. To make one dish.

I tried to choose my recipe wisely. I consulted these cookbooks:

I settled on a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance called Black bean, Mushroom, and Quinoa Stuffed Green Peppers. The ingredient list had only about a dozen items, several of which we already had, and the actual instructions were just two short paragraphs. I'm a big fan of recipes that fit onto just one cookbook page. So I thought I was safe.
First, since I was trying to avoid canned stuff as much as possible, I soaked a bag of black beans overnight. This wasn't so hard, it just took a little forethought. I had planned to make this dish on Tuesday night but had forgotten to soak the beans.  Anyway, while the beans started cooking (for an hour and a half!), I chopped up the veggies.

Lots of mushrooms

Lots of garlic

This recipe also calls for a chopped onion, but I didn't want to take any more pictures of chopped white things. I prepped these beautiful big organic green peppers (Bell peppers are on the Dirty Dozen list, so always try to buy organic!) for their stuffing while all the veggies cooked.

After about an hour and a half, the veggies, beans, and quinoa were ready to get stuffed into the peppers. When it was all said and done, they looked like this:

A little organic tomato sauce on top

Overall results were quite tasty. Les and I agreed that next time I would add more quinoa and more chili powder.  They are also supposed to have fresh cilantro on top, but I couldn't find any organic cilantro, and after reading the article last week about the average bunch of conventional cilantro having over 34 pesticides on it I decided to skip it.

It was a good recipe, and one pepper was very filling, healthy, and delish. BUT, I would recommend doing this recipe when you've got some left over soaked/cooked beans and some pre-chopped veggies looking for a dish. The extra dish washing alone is enough to make me prefer to skip a repeat.