Summer Tolma

So the other day I was at my grandma’s and it was really good. I haven’t seen her for a long time, if you want to know the truth and it just felt like that I should visit her and see her, and not only her, I mean, my aunt and cousin live there, too, so that I would see the three of them together, of course.

Well, the other day my aunt prepared a dish which they call the “Summer Tolma” or “Tolma in bell pepper” and things like that. It’s a meat and rice filling stuffed bell peppers and it’s really delicious and light and they call it Summer Tolma mainly because bell peppers ripen in summer and so that its crops are in summer and people associate bell peppers with summer. They mainly prepare Tolma with cabbage leaves, I guess, because that’s what I knew Tolma was like, until I heard that it can be prepared with different stuff. For example, this meat and rice filling can be stuffed in different things, such as grape leaves, eggplants and, I guess, all the other things that you can find to stuff something. So, there’s this variety of the “shell” of this meat and rice filling and you can decide which one you would like to eat with it.

The preparation process itself doesn’t involve too many things, I mean, Tolma in cabbage leaves needs more effort than this bell pepper one. It really doesn’t’ need too much time to be prepared.   I guess, it was just an hour or an hour and a half that the preparation process needed when I prepared this dish. So, you should definitely prepare it, as it’s really healthy _ it has meat, rice, bell pepper, so that you will get some vitamin C, fiber, protein and some other vitaminsand it’s not stuffed with many calories, if you have noticed, because it doesn’t have some other high-calorie things in it. So, this dish is just what people need, especially if they love meat and bell peppers and if they are on a low-calorie diet or just want to eat some healthy stuff and eat healthy, in general, they should really prepare this dish and eat it.

Ingredients:

• Meat (beef or beef and pork) 400 grams
• Bell pepper, 10 pieces
• Rice, 100 grams
• Spices
• Salt
• Parsley, fresh, 20 grams
• Coriander, fresh, 20 grams
• Onions, 2 medium
• Tomatoes, 2 medium
• Water, about 200 ml

Preparation process

So the preparation process involves washing all those ingredients and chopping the onions and herbs. Well, first of all, I took 100 grams of long white rice and washed it thoroughly and put it into a bowl. I had 400 grams ground beef and porkthat I added to the rice and mixed them together. I had those onions and parsley and coriander chopped or nearly blundered and half of a green pepper, too, and added them to the meat mixture. Then it was time for spices and seasoning. I love spices in my dishes, so that I added some ground coriander, thyme, red and black pepper and mint, and of course, I seasoned it with salt. Now, I didn’t want anything to be less in my meat filling, because then it’s not good enough and you don’t eat the dish with as much pleasure as you should, so I tasted how my meat mixture tasted. Well, my aunt cooked a little bit of it on a small frying pan when she was preparing this dish, so I also did that and that’s how I tasted my meat mixture and decided whether or not it needed anything else to be added or maybe it had something more, I mean, some ingredients, so I tasted it and it was good and didn’t need anything else. Well, that was my opinion, you know, so that I went on to preparing the bell peppers and other stuff besides meat.

The bell peppers just needed to be washed thoroughly. You know, I went to buy them in the supermarket nearby and there were both green and red bell peppers, but the red ones were long and narrow and that was not good for my dish, and those green ones were large and the meat would be stuffed there pretty well, so I took the green ones. However, I still wanted to have some red bell peppers, I mean, that’s what I wanted to buy, but since the red ones were not those type that I wanted, I took those green ones, though I knew some other places, where I might find those red bell peppers, so that I went there. Well, they had many red bell peppers, which I wanted, so that I just had to choose which ones were better. I took 7 pieces of red bell pepper and that was like 1.5 Laris,I guess, or something like that and, so, I had both red and green peppers for my dish and I could have both of them there and it would be more beautiful and more of summer .

So, after washing, I took out those white stuff that is inside the bell peppers, so that there was this hole, where I would put my meat mixture. As the mixture was already done, I just had to stuff the bell pepper. When I stuffed them and the meat mixture was all gone and, well, I had 10 bell peppers ready and it was just perfect amount for that meat mixture, I put those things into a saucepan with bottoms up and I just kind of made them stand in that saucepan, so that the meat stuff would stay in those bell peppers. However, if I had them put into the saucepan just however I wanted, the meat mixture wouldn’t get out of the bell peppers, I guess, but just in case, I made them stood that way. Well, then I poured some water on them, maybe it was about 200 ml or something. And it just needed some tomatoes without skin.  I had this large tomato, and by “large” I mean that it was really large. So I peeled it and blundered it in my blender and poured it into the saucepan, and it was so large, that its juice filled out the whole saucepan and I didn’t have to add any water. So, if you have that kind of tomato, or if you are using canned tomatoes, maybe you won’t even need to use any water, but if that tomato juice is not enough to cover the stuffed bell peppers, then you need to add some water.

One other thing, the stuffed bell peppers should be really close to each other when putting them in saucepan. And you need to add some salt in the juice, too, because otherwise the bell peppers won’t taste much delicious and you won’t like it, trust me. Well, if you love food without any salt, then you shouldn’t add salt, of course.

So, when you put the saucepan on the gas, you should let the juice boil and then you can turn the heat down, I mean, you can have it on a low gas and let it boil for an hour or so. At least, that’s what I did  and the dish turned out pretty good. You know, when I read some recipes, it doesn’t really say how many degrees something needs to be on or how much time it needs to bake or be cooked or something like that, especially in books. Here in Internet you can find many recipes for just one dish and probably you can find something like that in one of them, but still, it’s just weird. I mean, they tell you all the stuff about preparing some dish, they tell you the ingredients exactly, they also tell you how to prepare those ingredients for your dish and maybe they even tell you how many degrees Celsius should the oven be when baking or something like that, but the baking time is unknown, or the cooking time or whatever. It’s just crazy. Well, you can’t really say that this thing needs exactly this time to be prepared, because everything is different and, maybe, some things need a couple of minutes to get done and some things need more time for that, so you can’t say that exactly, but there should be something to guide you all the way through to the finish, so that it’s not good when you tell people something and just stop in the middle of the road and leave them there.

Anyways, if you want to know the truth, it’s not just “Summer Tolma”, actually , they made these things and put them in the cans and saved them for the winter, if I remember correctly. I mean, it was bell peppers and rice and herbs and I don’t know about the meat, maybe it didn’t have meat. My mother loved it and we had it for winter in cans and whenever we wanted we could open them and eat them. I didn’t really love them, though. So that, I guess, the elders ate them all, I mean, my parents loved them and my grandparents, too, and my aunt and, well, turns out, everyone loved them except for us _ children _ we practically hated them and never eat them. However, nowadays when I think about it, I realize how silly we were, those were really healthy stuff full of vitamins and that would be great for our body and everything if we could have just eaten them. In fact, I remember, my grandmothers telling us that the bell peppers were good for us and sometimes I used to eat raw ones, however I didn’t like their taste and I barely ate them. There’s another thing, too, those grandmothers were not living with us, so that they were not very close or nearby and we didn’t have to eat bell peppers so often. And I thought that was a good thing then. And  I just found out, that you can stuff some other things with these rice and meat, for example, you can take the inside of the eggplant out and put there this mixture of rice and meat and that will taste good, too, I guess, I haven’t tried that one yet. And you can put it in the tomato. Okay, eggplant is kind of hard and one can place this rice and meat mixture in it, but tomatoes? I don’t know about the tomatoes. However, if they say that you can stuff tomatoes and prepare that stuff, then we should believe that and, I can only believe that, until I prepare that myself and see how it’s done and things like that.

So, I hope, that this Summer Tolma will be a dish in your recipes. I didn’t really eat it, as I’ve mentioned above, but it is really delicious and I just realized that, besides it’s really healthy and benefits you and you really should prepare it and eat it. and I just remembered, that if you don’t eat meat, you can just use rice and those herbs, and maybe some other vegetables, for example, carrots, and make the filling from them and just stuff those bell peppers with them. That will taste no less than that one with meat, though I prefer everything with meat, because I just love many kinds of meat and I can’t really imagine how people can go without meat.

Anyways, it’s time for you to prepare some Summer Tolma. You won’t be disappointed in the dish, trust me!

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