Stuffed Peppers With a Mexican Flair

I love stuffed peppers! But my husband is not a huge fan of the normal rice and beef and tomato sauce version. So I thought I'd try something different and he really liked it! (Of course, he decided to eat it with chips, and that makes everything wonderful in his book :) But this dish would also be great served over quinoa or rice, and I ate the leftovers wrapped up in one of my home-made tortillas and it was delicious! You could even make it a vegetarian dish if you skipped on the ground beef. I got the recipe from Kitchen Stewardship, a great blog for finding healthy recipes and learning about nutrition! I substituted my own taco meat for the ground beef and seasoning packet because I wanted to avoid all the MSG and fake seasonings in those packets. My girls won't eat the peppers, but I saved them a mixture of the taco meat, corn, and beans before adding in the salsa. They loved it with a little bit of quinoa and cheese added.

Ingredients:
3-5 bell peppers, green or colored, halved, seeds removed
1/2 pound ground beef (or a full pound)
1 Tbs. taco seasoning (or follow package directions for 1/2 pound beef)
1 1/2 c. frozen corn (optional)
2 c. black beans (dried and prepared or about 1 can)
1 16 oz. jar salsa
1/4 c. diced red onion
(optional) other vegetables: diced red pepper, zucchini, leafy greens, etc…anything you have on hand to enhance the mixture
shredded cheese

Directions: Mix all the ingredients except cheese (I warmed mine and mixed on the stove top) and simply fill the raw peppers, adding a little water around them in the casserole dish to soften them up while it bakes. Bake 30 minutes, covered, before removing the cover for 5-10 minutes to brown the cheese.