Farida, I love You--Stuffed Vegetables

Farida, that Azerbaijani cooking whiz, so kindly gave me an award recently. First, Farida, Thank you.

Second, I am not great with awards/memes. I attribute this to a childhood of being picked last for games. (Yes, that was a pathetic ploy for sympathy but also true as I am totally uncoordinated.)

Anyway, I have such a hard time picking people for awards, but at the same time I am honored, because Farida's Azerbaijani Cooking is so wonderful and popular. So, I didn't want to seem ungrateful. So, I have decided instead of passing on the award, I would just honor my award giver by making one of her recipes. (I will treat those meme passer-on-ers the same soon, you know who you are.)

For Farida, I had to go with her stuffed vegetables. While aesthetics affect me more than I would like to admit, I made this choice not because of the lovely photograph (though it was lovely) but because of the inclusion of dal. It was a meat free night so we took out the ground meat, and upped the amount of dal to 1 cup, paired it with 1 cup cooked rice. (In case you are keeping score, I followed her directions and added the rice when she directed you to add meat.)

The result was delicious. I alloted two stuffed vegetables per person and one for Belle. We ended up with a little more stuffing, and I planned to make them into veggie burgers, but it was so good, we ended up eating it for breakfast. Alas.