This dinner–bell peppers and tomatoes stuffed with ground lamb and rice, is easy and fast, especially if you have a rice cooker. There are two tricky aspects.

1) Scooping out seeds and pith from the peppers and tomatoes can be treacherous, so be gentle with your knife or spoon and keep the integrity of the stuffee vegetable.

2) It’s not a given that you will find ground lamb in the supermarket. For us, it was fifty/fifty that ground lamb would be there.

The day I was most thwarted by lack of lamb was the day I understood a very basic fact of, well, meat. Wyatt and I were in the market, Wyatt sulking because I made him accompany me, and there was no lamb. I gave him money and sent him to the butcher, the proper butcher, 5 blocks away, to get ground lamb.

He came back with an incredible story. The butcher had no ground lamb when Wyatt got there, but then the butcher put some lamb meat in the grinder and ground it up, producing GROUND LAMB. Yes, Virginia, ground meat is actually just ground-up meat. I was floored and have not feared the lack of lamb again.

Below is a fairly bomb-proof recipe that serves 4 for dinner, with rice.

Lamb filling ingredients

What will be stuffed

• 3 bell peppers, any color
• 1 big tomato
• Cabbage leaves

For peppers: Cut off the tops of peppers so it’s as though you’ve removed its lid, sort of, the way you would when cutting a Halloween jack-o-lantern. Use a small knife to cut away the white stuff and seeds inside. You can rinse with water to get all the seeds out.

For tomatoes: Like you did with the peppers, cut away the top of the tomato, and with a paring knife and a spoon, scoop out the innards of the tomato. Be very gentle. My mother added the tomato innards into the lamb filling and said it was very good, so perhaps do that too. I did it once and frankly, it bothered me.

For cabbage leaves: Pull off some hearty leaves, wash them, and then just make a burrito with the lamb as the filling. I had to use cooking string to tie them up and let’s be honest about this–they don’t look that snazzy. But we had run out of peppers because one had molded (cursed pandemic shopping complexity), and I was desperate.

Put the lamb mixture in the peppers and tomato using a spoon. Consider filling all of them gradually rather than one at a time. You want each vegetable to be filled to the same level. Don’t overstuff.

Put the stuffed vegetables into a Pyrex dish and into the oven and cook for 1 hour.

When the peppers are done, there will be grease. Using tongs, pick up each vegetable and turn it upside down so the most amount of fat can pour out. Then put the tomato/pepper/cabbage bundle on a plate. When all the peppers/tomatoes are out of the Pyrex dish, drain the grease into your trusty grease jar.

Cut the peppers into halves or quarters and serve with rice (remember the rice cooker?) That’s what is so great about a rice cooker–you can forget about the rice until it beeps to tell you it is done.

NOTE: My mother, who has much antipathy toward following recipes (she finds them bossy), did her own thing with this recipe. She lives in a small town in the mountains and buys half a lamb every year. This year her lamb was very, very fatty, and so she browned the lamb and drained the grease before stuffing anything (She claimed to have drained off a full cup of grease). So if you can actually see fat in your lamb, you may want to brown it and pre-drain it.