Stuffed Peppers & Five Spice

When it's just me at home for dinner and James is away like he has been this week in Taipei, I never really feel like cooking proper meals. For some reason it seems like a lot of effort to cook and plate up just one serve. Anyway, I bought the ingredients to make stuffed peppers and five spice rolls a couple of days ago and after putting it off, I finally got around to making these tonight!

The first dish is served in most Chinese Dim Sum restaurants around the world. It is capsicums stuffed with minced fish meat, spring onions and chinese mushrooms, and served in a rich black bean and garlic sauce. Serve it with some steamed white rice and my goodness the combination of flavours is just divine! You get the saltiness of the black beans, the sweetness of just cooked capsicums and a nice springy texture in the stuffing. You can tell I get really excited when I talk about food!

This is only my second time making the stuffed peppers and I must admit they didn't turn out as good as the first time. But that's always the case with my cooking - I tend to cook up a really kick-ass dish the first time but then I'm never able to recreate that exact dish again! Nevertheless, dinner was still tasty and I enjoyed it while watching the latest episode of MasterChef Australia. Yeah, my life really does revolve around food! I live to eat. And this wouldn't be a blog about the things I love if it didn't include food.

The second dish is five spice meat rolls and I've made these plenty of times. I actually used the fish paste mixture leftover from the stuffed peppers, mixed it with some pork mince, seasoned it with lots of chinese five spice, wrapped in bean curd sheets and then deep fried. Delicious! More home cooking photos to come!