FitnessRum

This recipe turned out to be a grand fresh dish right at the first go. I was making it up while I was cooking it and I was improving it on the fly 🙂

Ingredients
250 g boiled chickpeas (I used canned chickpeas*)
200 g raw courgette/zucchini (1 middle-sized courgette)
1 tablespoon ground sesame
dill to taste
the juice of ½ lemon (to taste)
3 big red/green peppers to stuff

Garnish
Cucumber
Olives

Directions
All ingredients but for the peppers get in the food processor until evenly blended (my food processor is Kenwood FP220). The role of the zucchini is to add moisture to the chickpeas.

Have you ever tasted raw zucchini? They are super delicious. I had to blend for a long time because I had sliced the zucchini into big pieces, which would jump off the knives and remain in one piece. To blend them easier, chop the zucchini into small pieces. You have to blend the ingredients for a long time, so that the sesame, which takes a while to blend, gets ground too. Sesame and linseed move through the digestive tract intact unless ground or crushed. This mixture was enough for me to stuff three big peppers and some of it was left, which I enjoyed ladling right out from the bowl. Yummy! 🙂

Versions
Garnished with garlic – this dish will be great with garlic but I cooked it for lunch so I decided to take no risks and mortify anyone with my breath 🙂

To be used as dressing for meat/fish – in this case there has to be more zucchini and lemon so that it gets more moisture.

With more sesame it will start tasting more like hummus.

Instead of blending it you can crush / chop the ingredients by hand, and the sesame needs to be ground.

*I prefer boiling the chickpeas myself and I am no fan of canned food, but I use cans when I happen to have no chickpeas soaked in advance. It’s best when you soak the chickpeas for 24 or at least for 8 hours before cooking. Usually I soak it the evening before and I boil it on the next afternoon. Chickpeas are boiled at a low temperature for 90 minutes. It’s a good practice to have a bigger quantity boiled and frozen into ready to use dozes. At the moment I have 3 dozes of frozen beans. 🙂 You get as much as 250 g of boiled chickpeas from 100 g of raw / dried chickpeas.

I stuffed the peppers using a spoon and I garnished each of them either with cucumber or with olives. I left one pepper which I garnished both with cucumber and olives and this was my favourite version.

This became a truly tasty, sappy and satiating lunch!

Question: What versions can you think of using this recipe for stuffed peppers?