Poblanos stuffed with Quinoa, Black Beans and Corn.

This recipe is a hybrid of the quinoa pilaf I talked about at the end of my last quinoa post and a recipe from this month's Body & Soul magazine. The magazine has a recipe for great looking poblano pepper stuffed with a mixture of quinoa, black beans, mushrooms and corn, and dotted with goat cheese. But when I read the recipe, the quinoa was just boiled and the salsa didn't appeal to me. I knew my quinoa pilaf (from Veganomicon) would be better because the quinoa pilaf is cooked with sauteed onions, garlic, some tomato paste, and spiced with cumin and ground coriander seed. It has a ton of mexican flavor just on its own. So I decided to use that pilaf and toss it with black beans and corn and stuff it in poblanos a la the magazine recipe.

The poblanos are roasted and skinned. Then you make a small incision to remove the seed pod and seeds and stuff it with the quinoa mixture. Some salsa goes on the bottom of the baking dish (I used a homemade tomatillo salsa instead of the one in the recipe.) and the stuffed poblanos sit on top. Some fresh goat cheese is dotted on and the dish gets covered loosely with foil and goes into the oven to heat through. (The magazine recipe says to stir some goat cheese into the quinoa mixture too, but I skipped that because I thought it would be too rich.)

To plate, you spoon some salsa on the plate and top it with a gorgeous stuffed pepper and garnish with chopped cilantro. These are fantastic! Definitely company-worthy. Should you not like goat cheese, you could sprinkle on some grated Monterey Jack. You could also dot the heated stuffed peppers with some queso fresco just before you serve. And these can easily go vegan just by skipping the cheese altogether. You wouldn't miss it. There's a lot of flavor (and some heat from the poblanos) going on here.