Jalapeno poppers!

I found this recipe for yellow peppers stuffed with quinoa, corn, and feta cheese and wanted to try it. While grocery shopping at Fresh & Easy, I saw they only had a big bag of jalapenos as opposed to selling them by the piece. I grabbed the bag and some neufchatel cheese, and figured I'd make baked jalapeno poppers. We had some that were lackluster from Buffalo Wings and Rings the night before, and I figured I couldn't do much worse! My husband talks about these poppers that the wife of a coworker from a previous unit (5+ years ago!) made, and I was a little jealous to be honest. If he's going to be talking about someone's poppers, I want them to be mine, dang it! I tried 2 different recipes, one mixing cheddar cheese, cream cheese, garlic, and paprika, and the other just straight cream cheese. Both are wrapped in delicious bacon, I highly recommend getting nitrate free bacon, this way you can feel super good about your choice to nosh on deliciousness.

Recipe #1

5 large jalapenos (or more if they're smaller)
1/2 c cream cheese
1 c shredded cheddar
1 t salt
pinch of pepper
3/4 t smoked paprika
1 clove garlic, crushed
5 slices bacon

So, I don't think I ever really follow recipes exactly. Between a picky husband and kids, and my love of garlic, I'm always making changes. In this one, I used neufchatel cheese in place of cream cheese (in a fruitless attempt to make them better for me, heh!) and used about 5 cloves of garlic. Don't worry, it's not too much! Basically, this puppy is easy, I cut the tops off the jalapenos, slit it down the middle, and scraped out the membranes and seeds. I mixed the cream cheese, shredded cheese, salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic all together, then stuffed those bad boys. I would recommend you not stuff them too much, a lot of it ended up on my baking sheet, which really sucked, even though I tried hard not to stuff them too much. You wrap them in bacon, and keep it in place with a toothpick.



I took this picture while Kevin was taking them off the roaster (so the bacon fat would have somewhere to go!) I followed the recipe's guidelines, and it wasn't enough time. It was all pale and not so tasty, the bacon was stretchy and blech. We popped them back in the oven for another 10 minutes at 375, I would say a MINIMUM of 30 minutes in the oven.

Recipe #2

Now, this recipe is super simple. Cut the jalapenos in half, scoop out it's guts, fill with cream cheese and wrap with 1/3 of a strip of bacon then secure with a toothpick. Again, we followed the directions on the recipe for cooking time, and they came out much better.



Excuse the messy plate, but as you can see the bacon is much crisper looking. This was tasty, but we were missing the flavor of the first one.

Side by side pic


Verdict?

I would follow recipe # 1, but use a longer cooking time, and add way more than the 4 garlic cloves that I added (but then again, I love garlic!) If you're doing it for a game day situation, I'd do the recipe #2 situation (1/2 a pepper wrapped in 1/3 slice of bacon) to help stretch ingredients, but still use the filling recipe from recipe #1.