I adore peppers. My love affair started when I was old enough to sit in the front of a shopping cart. My mother tells me that my favorite treat from the market was a green pepper, which I would clutch in my arms until we got home. She would put me in my high chair while putting away the groceries, and then slice it up for me and give me a little homemade vinaigrette to dip it in. This was such a favorite snack that my mother claims that she used slices of green pepper to reward my potty training efforts.
(In case you're wondering, this hasn't worked on my children.)
A Love Affair with Stuffed Vegetables
Now Palestinians love to stuff vegetables. They love to stuff zucchini, eggplant, cabbage . . . any vegetable that can be turned into a conduit for a rice and meat stuffing has indeed been stuffed by an Arab woman. Menu-planning, if you are Palestinian, is pretty simple: keep a supply of meat and rice on hand, and then go to the vegetable market and bring home several boxes of seasonal vegetables. Stuff the vegetables with rice and meat, cook it in one big pot, and dinner is done. One day it is stuffed cabbage, another day it is green beans and meat over rice, another day it is stuffed squash, and then the last day might be a stuffed chicken. Serve all of this with yogurt, a fresh salad, a little bread, and dinner is done.
Cooking lessons are given from mother to daughter, so no one follows recipes. They simply mix up the rice filling, scaling quantities up or down depending on the number of mouths to feed, and then start stuffing vegetables. If they have leftover filling after making their main dish (usually stuffed cabbage rolls or stuffed cousa, a summer squash), then they use up the leftover filling by stuffing a few tomatoes or peppers, which they always have on hand. So stuffed peppers and tomatoes are a convenient use-up, not the star of the table.