If you are a fellow vegetarian, you can sympathize with the pains of smelling turkey around Thanksgiving. First BBQ season, now this?! Torture.

So my goal is to come up with recipes that will make up for the lack of post-turkey napping. This particular recipe is my mom’s and she doesn’t eat any gluten, so it’s gluten-free and vegan.

You can dress this up with pretty much any sauce you like. I baked mine (as shown in the recipe below) without sauce, but I’m sure if you wanted to a nice tomato sauce would be great. I put an Indian cashew & cumin sauce on mine which overpowered the taste of everything else, but it was still yummy.

On a side note, I absolutely hate Uncle Ben’s rice. I have never liked it, the smell grosses me out, just overall “ew.” So I saw this Sprouted Rice & Quinoa Blend and my mind automatically turned down the idea of anything that looked remotely similar to Uncle Ben’s. To my surprise (and I’m sure it didn’t hurt that it was cooked in veggie broth) it was actually delicious. Little tidbit of useless information for you right there.

Ingredients

• 1 cup quinoa and sprouted rice mix, uncooked and rinsed
• 1 3/4 cup vegetable stock
• 3 large bell peppers, cut in half vertically
• 1 small onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1/2 cup mushrooms, diced
• 2 cups butternut squash, cubed
• Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Preheat oven to 325°.

Roast the butternut squash in the oven for 30 minutes, checking every 10 to make sure it’s not burnt.

Meanwhile, boil the vegetable stock and add in quinoa mix. Cover the pot, and stir occasionally until all of the stock is absorbed.

In a medium skillet, sautée mushroom, onion and garlic until lightly browned.

Once the quinoa, butternut squash and veggie mix are all done, mix them together in a bowl (make sure it’s well mixed so each pepper will get a bit of everything).

Put the plain peppers in the oven (still at 325°) for 5 minutes or so, just to warm them up. Once that’s done, fill each pepper with the stuffing until it’s all used up. There shouldn’t be any leftover, or if there is you can just eat it on its own, very yummy!

Bake the stuffed peppers for 40 minutes. The peppers should look a little “wrinkly” when they’re ready! (Check the photos below to see what I mean. Sounds gross, it’s not.)

Enjoy! More Thanksgiving recipes coming up on Thursday. HINT HINT it’s much sweeter and involves pumpkin.