Turkey Meatloaf in Bell Pepper Rings

I want to start this off by saying that for the first time Mike let me cook his birthday dinner, but that's not really fair to him. In years past I've never thought about cooking dinner at all, let alone a birthday dinner. But this year, I found a great recipe that I wanted to try and thought his birthday would be the perfect time to try it out. (And since we're both so indecisive, he begrudingly let me cook it).

The Project

Make Meatloaf in bell pepper rings

recipe from Diary of a Recipe Collector

Results

(I actually wanted to try this because Lion loves bell peppers and I want to try anything to keep him loving different types of food. Unlike Blue who won't eat anything anymore)

All right I guess I need to start off by saying that since the boys still aren't big eaters, that I halved the recipe (and even then we still had leftovers!). And that I switched out ground beef  and bread crumbs for ground turkey and oatmeal because I thought it would be a little healthier for us.

So here we go...

First step is to cut the bell peppers into rings. Easy enough said; harder done when you have two little helpers right there with you. (One trying to eat the bell peppers; the other trying to play with them)

Once I cut them all up (and gave Lion some pieces to munch on), they both left me alone to mix the meat up. Which was perfect because I didn't want them anywhere near the raw meat. (I didn't want to be there myself!) I switched out garlic cloves for garlic powder and red pepper flakes for sriracha (and I forgot to put the egg in, but I didn't realize that until it was baking.)

And after getting over my dislike of raw meat, I had a fun time combining it all together. (And wouldn't be opposed to trying it again). 

Next up was to stuff the meat mixture into the pepper rings and then brown the meat.

All right so I forgot to half the amount of bell peppers, so I didn't quite fill my peppers as much as I should have. And you can see below that some of the larger rings 

And I'm not sure if ground turkey just browns quicker than ground beef or what, but I tried to leave the patties alone for 4-5 minutes and they were very brown by the time I got to them. 

So I just shortened the browning time and watched the next couple batches a little closer. And I was going to switch out the crushed tomatoes for diced (and I just might if I try this again), but decided against it. And then forgot to get the smaller can of crushed tomatoes. So it ended up completely covering my meatloaf pepper rings

And that's how it turned out. It really doesn't look like much when you cover it with twice as much crushed tomatoes as should.

As with everything I make I turned it over to my official taste tester.

And he loved it. But he really likes anything I make; especially if he can feed it to himself. So I made sure that Mike like it too. Which he did, but he would have liked it better if I had used ground beef instead of turkey. So much for trying to be healthy!

I really enjoyed it too. I got a little worried that not having an egg in it would wreck it. And perhaps it would have helped with the shrinkage. But really the dish turned out really nice. And it just encourages me to make more and more dinners for the family!