Sweet stuffed peppers recipe

I'm a big fan of the standard stuffed pepper recipe - stuffed with meat, cheese, onion, tomato and the like.  I'm an even bigger fan of a sweeter side dish variety.  These mini sweet peppers are stuffed to the brim with goat cheese, corn, dried apricots and basil, and are a fun and delicious finger food!

Ingredients

1/2 cup dried apricots, diced
3/4 cup sweet corn
2 Tablespoons basil, chopped
8 ounces soft goat cheese
12-18 mini sweet peppers

Directions

Wash and bake peppers on lined cookie sheet for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

Place peppers on plate and allow to cool to room temperature.

While cooking, heat corn in frying pan until gently charred.

Combine diced apricots, corn, basil and goat cheese and season with salt and pepper.

Cut a slit in the side of each pepper and use a spoon to scrape out seeds with a spoon.

Fill each pepper with goat cheese mixture.

Return stuffed peppers to oven and bake until goat cheese is warm and soft.

They're quick and easy, and a great twist on your normal stuffed pepper!

Orange Pepper Jack-O-Lanterns

Fall is here!  It's getting cooler, days are getting shorter, and every now and then there's a little preview of color on the trees.  I LOVE fall - it's one of my favorite things about living in New England, and this year Travis and I have vowed that we're going to do fall "right".

So far we've already been apple picking (blog to follow) to get honeycrisp apples (the MOST delicious apples ever) and are working on booking a trip to the Berkshires in mid-October.  

Tonight, however, we decided to get a little creative with orange peppers.  Last fall, after Halloween, Trav and I were walking through the grocery store and he had the brilliant idea to carve orange peppers to look like jack-o-lanterns.  Today I found some fun looking peppers at Trader Joe's and decided to get them so we could do a "test run" before we carve a lot of them for this year's trick-or-treaters.  Here's what we came up with!

Here are the things I learned while making these:

The best peppers are ones that are large and can stand up by themselves.  Cut the top off just like you would a pumpkin and hollow the inside out.

Cut out the face.  (Can you guess which is Trav's?  He's the king of silly faces...)

From here you could either "stuff" them and bake for some yummy stuffed "jack-o-lantern" peppers, OR put a tea light candle inside to make them tiny "pepper-pumpkins".  Smaller faces (like the pepper on the left) will work best for stuffing (so the insides don't fall out).  If you're going to put a tea light in them, cut a hole in the bottom too so the candle can sit on the table.  That way the light hits the teeth too!

Here's the result once you turn the lights out!

If you find a REALLY tall pepper, you might be able to leave the top on once it's lit...but otherwise, that's probably not the best idea.  (You don't want to start a fire...)  The tops of ours were charred after about 10 minutes.  

Won't this make a super cute addition to a Halloween party spread?  We can't wait to make a whole line of them this Halloween!