A few weeks ago, we had a lovely raki and mezze night with my boyfriend and two of my closest friends. Raki is the national drink of Turkey, and it is my favourite alcoholic beverage. But I don’t love just the taste of it; I love the whole “socialisation, eating long and drinking long with people you love” aspects of it. And of course, the mezze that comes together with it is equally important!

After that night, I thought of making a new mezze recipe. So these colourful stuffed peppers were just the thing I needed.

I found this 350 grams bag of baby peppers in Lidl in Helsinki. A few of them were too small to be stuffed, but I somehow managed to put a little bit of the cheese filling anyway. If you can pick and choose yourself, I recommend you do that.

Well, without further ado, here is a new mezze recipe for you!
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Ingredients:

Difficulty: Medium
(serves 4)

Printable PDF-recipe (no photos)

350 gr colourful baby peppers*
2+4 tbsp olive oil
100 gr feta, crumbled
100 gr goat cheese, diced small
2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp dried oregano

to serve, optional:
a drizzle of honey
a handful of toasted sliced almonds

*In Helsinki, you can find these in Lidl and some K-markets.

1. Preheat the oven to 200C. Put a baking paper on an oven tray and put it aside.
2. Cut the tops of peppers and put them on the tray. Pour 2 tbsp olive oil all over them. Put in the medium part of the oven and let them roast for about 25 minutes, until they get really soft. After that, take them out of the oven and let them cool so that you can handle them. Also, lower the oven temperature to 180C.

3. In the meantime, prepare the filling: put feta and goat cheese, 4 tbsp olive oil, red pepper flakes and dried oregano in a bowl and mash and mix together.

4. When the peppers are cooled down enough to handle, stuff them with the cheese filling and then put the stuffed ones back on the tray. Try to squeeze their heads a little to sort of close them as much as you can.

5. Put the stuffed peppers back in the medium part of the oven and roast a bit more, for about 7-8 minutes, until the cheese melts. Don’t keep it too long; always control what’s going on inside the oven. You don’t want the cheese to melt too much and flow out of the peppers. Put the ready peppers on a serving plate, drizzle with honey and decorate with sliced almonds. Enjoy warm – but cold works too (warm is still better, though!).