Home Style Lebanese Stuffed Peppers

Erma, only you would take a classic Mennonite Comfort Food like a Buttermilk Pie and add booze. Sometimes I think that you must have stock in a distillery, or get a kickback from the bourbon makers for promotion of their product. Well, see if you can add bourbon to this Comfort Food.

Almost every Eastern European country and much of the Middle East have their own versions of that old standby Stuffed Green Peppers. A Lebanese neighbor years ago shared with me what she called her favorite “real” Lebanonese recipe. My Polish grandmother’s Stuffed Green Peppers is almost identical. She used ground beef instead of lamb and brown sugar in place of the mint, cinnamon and cumin.

Isn’t it funny how the only difference between a Polish classic and an Lebanonese classic is the different herbs?

Home Style Lebanonese Stuffed Peppers:

6 large green peppers
1 ½ cups rice
1 pound ground lamb
1 (6 ounce ) cans tomato paste
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 teaspoon dried mint
Salt and pepper
Cinnamon and cumin to taste
Water

Cut off the tops of the peppers and hollow out. Combine the rice, lamb, one can of tomato paste and the seasonings. Stuff each pepper about 3/4’s full. Place the peppers into a dutch over sized pot. Mix the remaining can of tomato sauce and tomato paste with enough water to cover the peppers. Bring to a full boil.cover the pot, and simmer on low for one to one and a half hours. When serving, pour the juice over the peppers. I like to cook the tomato sauce down to a gravy thickness.

Comfort Food Buttermilk Pie

I tried your Mennonite Cabbage Salad yesterday and it is great. As you know, Max, I love tart sweet and sour salads. With the current price of lettuce (it was $1.69 for a miserable little head Saturday), we will be eating a lot of cabbage for salads around here.

Since we are talking about Comfort Food, and who personifies Comfort Food better than those German Mennonite cooks? Let’s not forget their rich, simple desserts Max.

There is never a time when any cook could not whip up a Mennonite Buttermilk Pie. The ingredients are kitchen staples, the prep time is minimal. Like you can stir it up while the oven is heating. If you don’t have real buttermilk on hand, you can substitute regular milk soured with a little vinegar or lemon juice until it curdles.

I like my Buttermilk Pies just a bit richer than most, so I use bourbon instead of vanilla which would probably cause some older Mennonite cooks to roll over in their graves. The choice is yours. It must be a regional thing. Southern cookbooks often use the bourbon while other regions of the country stick to the vanilla.

Mennonite Buttermilk Pie:

1 egg
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup buttermilk
¼ teaspoon vanilla (I substitute bourbon and increase it to a tablespoon)
Unbaked pie shell

Cream the egg, sugar and butter in a mixer. Add baking soda and flour to creamed mixture, Add buttermilk and vanilla/bourbon. And place in an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. Pie will continue cooking after removal from the oven. Let cool completely before cutting.

Mennonite Comfort Food

Erma, your Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole reminded me of another classic Mennonite recipe. Our local Mennonites call this Cabbage Salad. Most anyone else would call it marinated cole slaw, and there are dozens of recipes for it. What makes this one different is that the cabbage and onions sit for a while with the sugar to make a kind of sweet brine.

This Mennonite Cabbage Salad would be perfect with your Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole. Like the Pennsylvania Dutch (after all, most Mennonites came from the same regions of Germany), our Mennonites like to combine sweet and sour dishes like the Cabbage Salad with a soft bland one like your casserole. Both of these recipe illustrate a facet of Mennonite cooking that you forgot to mention. Not only are their recipes inexpensive and use common ingredients, but they can be fixed whenever there is time and set aside to eat later.

Mennonite Cabbage Salad:

One large head of cabbage
One onion
1 cup sugar

Shred the cabbage and onion in your food processor. Stir in the cup of sugar and let sit for 10 to 20 minutes for sugar to melt into the cabbage liquids. Then make the Dressing

Dressing:

2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon celery seed
¾ cup vinegar
½ cup salad oil

Mix all in a sauce pan, and bring to a boil. Pour at once over the cabbage and let sit until completely cool. Stir several times. Place in a plastic refrigerator container and chill at least overnight before serving. This will keep for at least a week.

Makes 10-14 servings.

Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole

You made bread yesterday to celebrate the return of cool weather, and I cranked out an old Mennonite chicken recipe. I was busy picking up the house, doing laundry, and getting ready to work outside in the gardens pulling weeds, so I needed a take-care-of-itself kind of recipe.

Long ago, in another life, I worked with a reference librarian who demanded that the library buy a Mennonite cookbook as our standard reference tool. Jasper insisted that all basic cooking questions could be answered from this old classic and he was right. We didn’t have Mennonites in our section of Kentucky, but their style of cooking was just like the home food that I grew up with.

As is typical of Mennonite cookery, the ingredients are things that you always have in the kitchen, are cheap (few meats are cheaper than chicken thighs), and the result is a comfort food you associate with your childhood.

Mennonite Chicken Thigh Casserole:

¾ cup white rice
2 tablespoons minced onion
2 tablespoons minced celery
1 tablespoon minced carrot
¼ cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup butter
1 ½ cups water with 1 chicken bouillon cube dissolved in it
¾ cup milk
4 large chicken thighs
Seasoned salt that has paprika
Paprika

Grease a casserole that has a tight fitting lid, about 9 x 9 inches. Sprinkle on the rice. Mince the onion, celery and carrot and sprinkle on the rice. Dust on the flour and salt. Chop the butter into small cubes and place in the casserole. Carefully pour in the liquids. Arrange the chicken pieces on top and sprinkle with seasoned salt. Cover tightly and bake at 325 degrees for 2 hours until the chicken is tender. Toward the end of the taking, sprinkle on additional paprika for color. If the mixture is still too runny, remove the top for a few minutes additional baking and a nice golden top.

Serves 4.