Kitchen Witch Sundays - Jalapeno Poppers

This savory recipe belongs to my second cousin and I learned how to make them from him. They're what he calls a 'putzy' recipe - that is, they take a lot of time and prep. And truly, I only used 10 jalapenos (making 20 poppers) for this recipe, but it took over an hour to make them all and then another 30 minutes to cook so they are putzy indeed. But they are so, so good even when done in several ways like pictured above that I'll explain over the course of this post. My cousin used to make them for us twice a year when he visited, but since I'm no longer living with my mother and those visits are a thing of the past so I learned to make them for myself once I knew that was going to be the case to carry on the tradition.

You'll Need The Following;

• 8-12 good sized jalapenos
• 2 8oz bars of cream cheese
• 3 pounds ground meat of choice
• 2 bags of Shake and Bake
• Gloves

For the meat I usually prefer sausage, but in this case the turkey was all they had at the store so I seasoned it myself with some cumin, coriander and Lowery's Seasoning Salt. As long as it's ground and solid meat anything will do though.

My cousin prefers the extra crunchy/crispy Shake and Bake but the original works just fine. The extra crispy does make it a little on the extra good side, though. I tried this with panko crumbs once too, that was amazing.

I cannot stress the gloves enough on this one. Unless you are used to handling hot peppers or other kinds of foods that contain capsicum you are in for a very bad time if you do not have gloves. There's a condition my cousin called 'pepper hands' which I have experienced for myself and it feels like your hands are literally on fire. Nothing helps this except putting ice on your hands and time for it to wear off and the entire time it's painful. Please, please do not make my mistakes and just wear the gloves.

Put your gloves on and start by slicing the top stems off the peppers and then slicing them in half so they look like the half on the right.

If you don't want to burn your mouth out every time you eat one of these take your knife and a spoon and scrape out the seeds and light green parts the seeds are attached to. That's where the majority of the spice is, though you can still get some from the peppers themselves but it won't be nearly as bad if you scrape the seeds out.

Please, please make sure you do this with the peppers facing sideways and not towards your face. Remember the pepper hands I talked about? Imagine if that stuff got in your eyes. NOT FUN.

Once your peppers are cleaned out (or intact if you prefer them that way), fill the gaps in with cream cheese. Stuff it nice and full, but don't over stuff them or else they'll leak everywhere.

After this step you can take your gloves off if you desire, you should be safe from pepper hands now that the seeds and a lot of the juice have been dealt with.

Tips and tricks from my cousin - Shake and Bake comes with a baggie to put your meat in and shake around to coat the stuff, so use it. Get a good handful of meat and put it on the bag, then fold it over to flatten it out. The plastic won't stick to the meat, and your hands will stay slightly more clean while you're flattening the meat out.

Before you start this step begin to preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. It should be preheated by the time you get the rest of the next steps done.

Put your peppers in the meat and wrap them up. They'll look like awkward meat sacks but that's alright. The seal around them doesn't have to be perfect, either, just good enough. The only thing you need to remember here is which way has the exposed cream cheese is and keep that up, otherwise you're asking for cream cheese to leak out everywhere.

Roll your meat sacks with Shake and Bake so they look like most of the ones in the top row. In the spirit of my cousin I left a few uncoated because those are the ones that still have their seeds inside of them so they can be told apart from those that don't. A few are covered in squished and canned chicken because I didn't buy enough meat to cover all of them so I had to improvise with what I had on hand XD

Bake for 30 minutes and enjoy. As you can see some of these split a little, but there's no cream cheese leak and all that liquid stuffs is just from the meat cooking.

After that, eat and enjoy! You can use a cream cheese or ranch based dip for these but I think they're perfectly good just as they are. The peppers remain solid and slightly crunchy, there's a creamy filling and meat, and what more could you ask for? Besides maybe bacon, I've known people who nix the sausage and go with bacon, or bacon wrap around the sausage and that is really good too but I'm sharing the way my cousin made them :)

All pictures here were taken by me specifically for this post. I have been a home cook for over a decade, and any questions or comments about this recipe are encouraged!