Stuffed bell pepper halves in the oven

For the filling of the pepper, we take boiled rice. The rice should be boiled just enough so that the centers of the grains remain undercooked. This is about 10 minutes. The rice will finish cooking and be ready while the stuffed peppers are being prepared in the oven.

There is no need to boil the chicken breast. Cut the raw chicken fillet into small cubes.

Pour the chopped chicken into the cooled boiled rice.

Peel and wash the carrot and onion. From these vegetables, we make a sauté for the filling. First, we place finely chopped onion in a pan with vegetable oil. To the sautéed onion, which is translucent, we add grated carrot. Fry until the carrot is browned, then cool the vegetable sauté. When the sauté cools down, we pour it into the bowl with the chopped chicken fillet and boiled rice.

Add salt and ground (black) pepper to the prepared filling ingredients for the peppers. Mix all the filling components.

Now we can start stuffing the peppers. If we are stuffing fresh peppers, we cut each pepper lengthwise into two halves. At the same time, we also cut the stems in half along with the pod. We clean all the pepper halves from seeds and then wash them under running water. Then, we fill the halves of the bell peppers with the prepared filling of chopped chicken fillet, vegetables, and rice. We fill all the voids in the pepper halves with the filling and slightly compact it. Additionally, we place a little more filling on top to create a mound of filling above the stuffed bell pepper half. If we are stuffing frozen pepper halves, we fill the halves with the filling without thawing them.

Now we wash the tomato, cutting the tomato fruit crosswise into slices. On top of each pepper half filled with filling, we place a slice of tomato. In winter, frozen slices of tomato can be used for this purpose. In this case, we quickly cover the filling on the pepper with the frozen tomato slices.

Next, we grate two slices of mozzarella cheese on a grater with medium-sized holes. We sprinkle the grated cheese over the two stuffed halves of the pepper.

In a baking dish lined with parchment, we place the stuffed and cheese-sprinkled pepper halves.

For variety, we will cover the next two stuffed halves of the pepper with whole slices of cheese.

We also send these stuffed pepper halves with cheese to the baking dish.

On top, we drizzle the stuffed pepper with two tablespoons of vegetable oil.

Preheat the oven to +190 °C. Then, we send the stuffed halves of the pepper with chicken fillet and rice to the oven for 25 minutes. The melted cheese forms a delicious golden crust on top of the peppers.

Stuffed bell pepper halves in the oven are served hot. Serve fresh herbs with the pepper.