Necessity may be the mother of invention, but improvisation is the child of having a lot of extra crap lying around. In this case, I had a red bell pepper my mother had left at my house a week and a half earlier, and a bag of medium-sized red onions that I didn't know how to use up. I don't often eat bell peppers (or onions) and since I didn't know what to do with this one, it was starting to dry up and shrivel a bit. I hate to see food go bad, so I looked under the "Peppers" heading in the "Vegetables" section of my 75th Anniversary edition of Joy of Cooking, and instead of finding something easy, like fajitas, I found a recipe for chiles rellenos.
Chiles rellenos are poblano peppers stuffed with scallions and cheese, topped with salsa. I hear they are really good. I had a jar of salsa, but instead of a poblano, I used the red bell pepper; instead of scallions, I used an onion; and instead of good, fresh Mexican cheese, I used vegan "mozzarella".
I sliced the onion and put it in a glass loaf pan. I rinsed and scored the skin of the pepper and set it on top of the onion slices and drizzled both in olive oil. I put the loaf pan in the oven for 15 minutes or so at 350. Then I moved the pepper to a bowl and covered the bowl tightly with plastic wrap. Once it had cooled, I peeled the pepper. (I halved the pepper and removed the seeds before cooking it, but you're supposed to do it after. Let's pretend that...) Next, I halved the pepper and removed the seeds and stem and ribby things.
I put the onion slices in a skillet and cooked them down more until they were mostly softened. I put the pepper halves back in the loaf pan with a little more oil. Then, on top of the pepper halves, I carefully placed alternating layers of the vegan cheese (I used about 3/4 C.) and the softened onion. I baked it all at 350 for about 15 minutes, until the cheese just began to brown on top.
While the pepper was cooking, I toasted two corn tortillas in a skillet with some vegetable oil. About five minutes before the pepper was done, I heated up some Hatch chiles and salsa just by putting them in the oven in little oven-safe bowls. I put the tortillas on a plate side by side and put a pepper half on each tortilla and topped one pepper half with Hatch chiles and the other with ordinary medium salsa. I put some avocado and tomato slices on the plate too, but the avocado didn't taste very good with this (though that may have been because it wasn't a very good avocado).
Here are some of the ingredients I used:
And here's what the finished meal looked like:
This "recipe" turned out better than I expected it to. The cheese and onion filling had a very smooth, thick, creamy texture and tasted surprisingly good. The flavor of the red bell pepper mostly disappeared between the flavors of the tortilla and the filling, which was fine by me. The medium salsa gave it all a real kick, and the Hatch chiles were a nice variation.
I would make this again if I ended up having the same ingredients on hand, but really, it was just good enough to make me want to try the real thing.
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