Recipe: Stuffed Mushrooms

Hello! Occasionally, I like to post recipes of things I make, when I can remember to take photographs. Okay, when I say occasionally, I mean I've done it ONCE before. Some of you who follow me on twitter or various other places might know that I recently joined Weightwatchers. I'm not going to turn this into a food or weightloss blog, but I know a lot of people use the ProPoints plan, and I spend ages looking for new types of food or recipes to try so when I found this one, I knew a lot of people would probably benefit from it. Even if you're not following any kind of food plan or diet, these are still a lovely alternative to meat, and would be a nice Vegetarian option for a meal. Unless vegetarians eat cheese. Okay, I just checked. The cheese I used in this recipe IS suitable for Vegetarians.

Basically, what you're aiming for, is this:

You Will Need:

• Large Flat Breakfast Mushrooms/Portobello Mushrooms
• 1/2 a Red Pepper, de-seeded
• 1 Spring Onion
• 1/4 a Courgette, diced
• 40g Soft Cheese ( I used Charleville garlic&herb spreadable, but I've used  2 low-low cheese triangles before, or 2 laughing cow triangles). 

I started off by getting three big flat breakfast mushrooms (I got a packet of 5 in Aldi for 99cent) and I used three because I wasn't having any meat with my meal - if you're doing these as an accompaniment, two is more than enough, because they are quite filling. The next step is to prepare the red pepper for the stuffing - you need to get the skin off. You can do this a number of ways, but I prefer to pop them under the grill for a few minutes on a very high heat, wait until the skin goes black, then leave to cool and peel the skin off.

While they're cooling, you can start getting the other ingredients ready. Chop the courgette and spring onion into tiny little diced pieces. Then, dice the flesh of the red pepper and add it to your mix. Spoon in 40g of the Charleville spread (or whatever you decide to use) and mix well. Check out my uber-cool Thomas the Tank Engine bowl :)

I have to admit, while chopping the spring onion, I had a little Castaway moment and did, for a second, contemplate drawing eyes on this little Wilson-esque head. But then I realised that I was neither trapped on an island, or a 5-year-old.

When you've got that done, put all the stuffing into the mushrooms as I've done in the first picture, and then make them into little parcels with tin foil. All mushrooms leak water when cooking, but these ones are particularly messy, so I wrap mine individually and pop them into a baking tin so that the water doesn't leak everywhere.

I completely forgot to take a picture of them when they were done, but I cooked them at gas mark 5 for about 20-25 minutes. For those of you who are following ProPoints, all you have to point is your cheese. The one I used was 1pp for 20g, so the mahossive dollop I used up there was 40g, or 2pp. 2pp for three entire mushrooms? Score. I forgot to take a picture of the cheese (can you see how desperate I was to eat them? All photography thoughts went out the window when I put them in the oven) but it's this exact brand and tub, only I used the garlic & herb one, and it's in a purple tub.

Image: www.tesco.ie

Enjoy!
S xx