Paleo Sausage Stuffed Peppers
Sausage and In Peppers
Sausage and peppers has always been one of my favorite Italian comfort foods, and also rather easy to make. I had been pondering writing some new stuffed pepper recipes due to their easy, and decided to spin the common recipe to merge my love for two different recipes. This is another one that is an easy way to feed the whole family with 10 minutes of prep time, or simply get 3 or 4 meals cooked ahead of time for yourself.
This is a picture before cooking in the crock.
What you need:
- 1 pound of ground Italian hot sausage.
- 5 assorted bell peppers. I went with 2 green, 2 red, 1 yellow.
- 1/2 head of cauliflower, grated or chopped into a “rice” consistency.
- 1 small (8 ounce) can of tomato paste.
- 1 small white onion, medium dice.
- 1/2 head of garlic, minced.
- 1 small handfull of fresh basil, minced (or 2 tsp. dried).
- 2 tsp dried oregano.
- 2 tsp dried thyme.
How you make it:
- Cut the tops off of your peppers and scoop out and discard the seed, yet do save the tops!
- Process or chop about half a head of cauliflower into “rice” and put in a large mixing bowl.
- Add your minced garlic, basil, and dried herbs, and onion to your cauliflower and mix by hand.
- Use a very hot skillet to lightly brown your sausage. This step is entirely optional based on your motivational level. The sausage will cook just fine in your slow cooker, yet I personally like to hit it with a little sear to take the flavor up a notch.
- Add your sausage and can of tomato paste to your bowl of seasoned cauliflower and mix by hand. Let the kids do this part, getting hands messy in necessary, a spoon just won’t cut it.
- Fit as much of your sausage mixture into your peppers as you can. Place your peppers into your slow cooker and loosely place the pepper tops back on. If you have extra meat and cauliflower mixture, just jam in between your peppers and let it cook. You could save it for a breakfast scramble too if you are awesome, yet I’d just feed the slow cooker more.
- Cook on low for 6 hours. I set my slow cooker to shut off once it’s temperature probe hit 180 degrees. Maybe I just like using that feature. Just cook it on low for 6 hours.
- Please do post in comments if you made any super modifications to this recipe you think others will enjoy.
You should cook these too:
Category: Pork
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Where do you buy paleo approved sausage?
I could not find paleo sausage, so I went with some ground beef, salami, and turkey bacon. I just wing’ed it on the portions. I also added Green onions to the mixture. I didn’t have cauliflower so I used broccoli. I only used green peppers, so its super green. I call it Greenz Stuffed Peppers. Will try it out in a few hours and let everyone know. Wish me luck!
Nice! What kind of sausage is acceptable to you is a personal choice. The biggest difference here is your use of broccoli instead of cauliflower, which usually is used to take the place of rice. That still sounds like something I would totally eat. If it comes out good, take a picture and share it up on our facebook page please! Good luck!
Loved this! My 9 year old son loved it too. He didnt even know that it wasnt made with rice.
Having grown up eating stuffed peppers (a staple of the Eastern European diet), i tried making the paleo version. As i couldnt find Italian sausages anywhere, i used ground beef instead. Similarly, as i had no dried oregano in the cupboard, i substituted dried mixed herbs instead. I had quite a bit of mixture, so much so that ive ended up with about a week’s worth of food! (10 capsicums used lol) Which is GREAT, given i have 11 month old twins to care for – so now i dont have to cook for a while
) I didn’t have a slow cooker either, so i just placed the capsicums in two pots, and cooked in the oven at 180 degrees celcius for 1 1 /2 hrs. I also added lots of black and cracked pepper and some salt to taste. It tastes amazing!
Here’s a link to a Homemade Italian Sausage recipe (hot or mild, to taste). I’ve made it with some minor modifications to paleo-ify… I’ve used this mixture to make patties or in hashes, paleo pizza, frittatas. I don’t put in the sugar and it is still fantastic. I intend to try the above recipe with this:
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/homemade-sweet-italian-sausage-mild-or-hot/
Thank you so much for this recipe. I made it today with turkey sausage. It was delicious. I’ll be eating this for lunch the next couple days.
Stuffed peppers are my hubby’s favorite meal. I usually only make them for his birthday, but these looked so yummy that i decided not to make him wait. I doubled the recipe (there are six of us) and made them with 1/2 grass fed beef and 1/2 Italian sausage. I still kept the spices in the same quantity and definitely used the cauliflower in place of the rice. I also added a smidge of salt. I cooked all of the meat before I put everything in the crockpot and they were done in about two hours on low. Lastly, I added about 1/4 cup of water to the bottom of the crockpot– just enough to steam the peppers nicely (normally, I would have put them in a pot of boiling water to soften them up a bit before stuffing them). These were delicious! Thank you so much. I can’t wait to try more recipes from your site (tomorrow is the apple, bacon, pecan stuffed pork chops. Yum!).
6 hours in a slow cooker on low is way too long. Peppers will turn to mush and make it hard to serve. They will still taste good, but have the consistency of that Halloween pumpkin on your porch that you forgot to throw out.
I just put mine into the crock pot. I made it exactly as the recipe states. I don’t know how you had any extra filling though. I used 5 peppers; 2 green, 2 yellow, and one red and had to skimp on filling the last pepper. They were probably larger than the peppers you used, I guess. I may try using extra meat next time or maybe half sausage and half burger or maybe even a mix of hot and sweet sausage. Oh well, I’m looking forward to eating these later! They smell yummy!
I made these last night and I was impressed. I’m not huge on sausage flavor, so next time I make them I will probably use hamburger – or half and half. Anyhow, loved them. My 4 year old even ate them.
I’ve made this several times, my whole family enjoys it. I usually like to stuff extra sausage links in for my son. This time, with the left over mixture, I chopped up the other half of cauliflower and added a can of diced tomatoes. This way, I won’t have a half of head of cauliflower left and it make a nice sauce to spread over the peppers. Btw, I used roughly 1-1/2 lbs of sausage and only 4 peppers that way I had a lot of extra “stuffing” for the pot.
I just made these tonight. Instead of the Crock Pot, I baked them in the oven at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. I made my filling in a large pan on the stove. Sugar-free Italian sausage, onion, garlic, above spices, sea salt, pepper, 14 oz. can tomato sauce and one head cauliflower processed into “rice”. Once everything was cooked/heated through, I stuffed 6 bell peppers. Worked perfectly!
Just popped into the crockpot, and can’t wait to eat. I have never made stuffed peppers, but my husband grew up eating them so I can’t wait to see what he thinks.
I, of course, couldn’t find an 8 oz can of tomato paste, so I used 1-6 oz cans of organic paste. I figure this will make it more juicy (and was too asleep to weigh it out this am. I think I need to add more cauliflower. I used about 3/4 medium head, but as I had very large peppers I could have used more filling as well. I believe I will also try getting some ground venison and/or buffalo to use for this. Okay, not I am seriously hungry for this.