Italian Vegetable Dishes That Will Make Veggie Haters Happy

Can you imagine me being excited to see and eat all of these vegetables, like, I don't know, five years ago? No, I don't think so. So, I should explain. Basically, when Eva and I met, I ate no vegetables. Well, I guess it's technically not true. I guess there's some tomato in Hot Pockets. See, maybe yes. I don't know. Actually, I don't know if there is tomatoes in Hot Pockets. Something resembling tomatoes. I really didn't like vegetables. And, you know, part of that is if you live on a steady diet of, like, Hot Pockets and frozen pizza dipped in ranch dressing, it kinda nukes your taste buds. And so, the idea of eating just, like, some green beans or something wouldn't even register on my tongue. But then, finally, you met me. Absolutely. And now I am, like, a vegetable addict. In fact, your dad, I've heard him say to people, he thinks I can't understand dialect, Calabrian dialect, but I can. And I've heard him say to people, you won't believe how many vegetables this kid will eat. But it wasn't an overnight process. And some of the things that started to change my mind about vegetables was a, I guess, category of Italian vegetable dishes that, let's just say, they kinda ease you into vegetables. They are amazing if you love vegetables, but also amazing if you don't love vegetables. Sarpia, you are talking about the category of stuffed vegetables that we have a lot in Italy. We use a lot in Italy, from the north to the south. And we stuff the vegetables with everything. For everything, I mean, really everything. Should we start with the stuffed vegetable dish that began it all? Sì, arpero. Also because it's one of my favorite ones. The first vegetables that I'm going to stuff today is a tomato. Isn't a tomato technically a fruit? First, I need to scoop out of the tomatoes all the seeds and the water. And keep in mind that we are going to use this part, so don't throw it away because we will need it. We also save this part of the tomato. That we call calotta. I don't know, how do you call this in English? The cap. I don't know if there's a name for that, but whatever that is. We call it calotta. All the seeds and all the inside part of the tomatoes that we saved before, we need to mash with a fork. So now is the moment in which we can prepare the stuffing of our tomatoes. And our stuffing is made with the tomato juice, the tomato seeds, the tomato water, a bunch of herbs. Here I have mint, parsley, basil, some thyme. A trick that I use to give an extra tomato flavor to my tomatoes is adding a little bit of tomato paste. We need garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil. Last but not least, the main ingredient, which is rice. Keep in mind that the rice will grow when the tomatoes will be cooking. So I'm going to put a tablespoon and a half for each tomato that I'm going to do, which means three tomatoes. So four tablespoon and a half. And now we leave the rice to, in Italian we say insaporire, to get all the flavor from this sauce. And we leave it like that for about one hour and a half, two hours. Two hours later. Pomodori ripieni con riso, which means tomatoes stuffed with rice, are always cooked in a pan like that with potatoes. We need to season the potatoes a little bit, which means a little bit of olive oil, salt, black pepper. And I'm going to add a little bit of the liquid where the rice was soaking in. It's the moment to stuff our tomatoes. Before we stuff them, we need a little bit of oil. And be sure with your hands that all the inside is coated with oil. Maybe also a little bit outside. Remember always also to salt the tomatoes because they are not salty. And how we are going to stuff, we take some rice and we place inside. We don't want to fill completely the tomatoes because the rice will expand when it's going to cook in the oven, which means that it will, how do you say? Overflow. Yes. So more or less leave a finger in between the edges of the tomatoes and the rice. You can place the tomatoes here. We can put some extra sauce on the potatoes. So we have all the flavor here. We bake them at 400 degrees for a night for about 50 minutes or until the rice inside is cooked. It's very important that you eat your pomodori con il riso cold. Cold doesn't mean from the fridge, but it means room temperature. Are we about to eat a vegetable? Are we about to eat risotto? No, these are our pomodori con il riso and it's the traditional, one of the traditional dish from Rome in summer. If you go now in Rome, you see them all over the city. And when I was there, living there, you can't imagine how many pomodori con il riso I had during summer. I want to point out how this dish is vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, because it's for everyone. Including people who hate vegetables, because I know, because this is one of the first dishes you introduced me to that I loved despite not loving vegetables. Buon appetito. In your mouth, this dish that just, bam, is an explosion of flavor. One of my favorite risotto dishes is risotto al pomodoro with tomato sauce. But this is fascinating because since it's not really a risotto, it's not cheesy and buttery and stuff, it's a much more fresh, light tomato rice. And there is the mint. Yeah, the mint. That plays a role, amazing. Yeah. To me, this is a much better kind of summer dish. It feels very fresh. It is a summer dish. The quintessential of a good summer. Yep, that's why this is definitely one of my favorite stuffed vegetable dishes. Yeah, because you never had what I'm going to do next. The second vegetable that we are going to stuff today is peppers, bell peppers. Pepperoni. Pepperoni, the Italian pepperoni, which means those, no salami. We need to clean the inside. Do you save the, what did you call it? Yes, the calotta. Certo, we need to save this because now we need to put it back. Before we stuff our bell peppers, we need to pre-cook them, which means that we are going to bake them at 380 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes. While the peppers are baking, we can prepare our stuffing. And this time, we are going to use another vegetable to stuff our pepper, and we are going to use eggplants. Eva, eggplants aren't a vegetable. They are a way of life. Yes, this time I agree. Eggplants is one of the best produce that we can have in all our planet. And the only way to cook eggplants in order to make them taste as one of the most delicious things in all your life is to fry them in extra virgin olive oil. The only thing that makes fried eggplants taste better is adding tomatoes. I'm going to create a sauce out of these tomatoes, but we don't want the tomatoes completely disappear. I'm going to add peppers, olives, anchovies, basil, and the fried eggplants. Oh, it smells like caponata in here. I know, it smells too good. I already know how good that's going to be. I'm going to add the toccato, some slice of a very good bread. You put everything's going in this pepper, all of our favorite things. Don't use for this kind of recipe a bread like, I don't know, Wonder Bread or something like that, because that doesn't work. You need a very good bread. Toasting the bread? We need always some extra olive oil, because as my mom said, olive oil makes everything taste better. I have a feeling that even just like that, you've got a really good dish on your hands. I know, I know, I know. Don't start to say like that, because I'm tempted actually to eat like that. The last thing that we need to put in our stuffing is some cheese. Oh, now everything's in it. I'm going to use a fresh pecorino. If you don't find a fresh pecorino, you can use scamorza, mozzarella, provola, provolone, fontina. Also very good cheddar, it can make the work here. And also, of course, some good parmigiano. Our bell pepper should be soft, but still not completely cooked, because now we are going to stuff them. This is just tomato puree. We salt it. A little bit of pepper. A little bit of olive oil. And this is the sauce in which we are going to cook our peppers. Now finally is the moment in which we can stuff the pepper. In each pepper, a little bit of olive oil, a pinch of salt, because the pepper is not salty. And we place the stuffing. Some extra cheese, because it's always good. We cover them. And we will bake them at 380 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes. And then we will check on them. We need to bring them back in the oven without the aluminum foil for about five minutes, just the time to make them a little bit more colored. It's very important also to, how do you say? Baste. Oh. Baste. Baste, it's like wet them a little bit. Yeah, baste. You literally just put all of my favorite things in this pepper. Eggplants, tomatoes, bread, the combination of capers, olives, and anchovies. Cheese. Gee, I wonder if I'm gonna like this one or not. I'm so sorry. Who doesn't like peppers? Peppers are good. I used to eat peppers on frozen supreme pizzas. Okay, Harper. Melty cheese there. Oh, that is a thing of beauty. Buon appetito. Because if the pomegranate rice in your mouth made bam, this in your mouth is making bam, bam. It's like fireworks. I know. And there's so much flavors developing, and oh my gosh. It's something. The stuffed pepper like that is something, Harper. The bread is so amazing. It gets that amazing texture of bread that has been toasted to a crisp, but then cooked with a bunch of other things, and so it soaks up all that flavor. I've got a new favorite stuffed vegetable now. This, for me, is an anytime, all the time, whenever you want, you put this in front of me, I will eat it. See, the only thing, Harper, is that peppers and eggplants and tomatoes, they are summer product. Not if you live in a country where everything is grown in greenhouses and imported from Mexico. I don't know, it's not. But they do not taste good as they should taste. I'm sorry, you can put that stuffing into the worst pepper on planet Earth, and it will taste amazing. So don't give me that. This is really up there. Up where? Up there in the heavens, where gods and heroes reign supreme. What is this dish called? Peperoni ripieni alla Eva. You invented this? Si, Harper. So it's traditional stuffed pepper because it was inspired by the Neapolitan version. But then the idea of the taste of eggplants fried and the tomatoes, that we call the parmigiana, and the cheese, and the olive, and the pepper, and the anchovies, and all this has come out. If I keep her bragging, I can eat more of it. Si, it's like, I'm talking, you are eating. Today. I think we've got time for one more, and I have a challenge for you. Because so far, you've had it pretty easy. You've had tomatoes, you've had peppers, pretty easy to make those taste good. I think you should stuff a vegetable that even in Calabria, you joke that it has no taste. You know which vegetable I'm talking about? Last but not least, our zucchini, or zucchine. I know that for most of people, zucchine, they don't taste really good. So we are going to stuff them in a way in which you will love the zucchini. But now we need to start with, how do you say? Scooping out? Scooping out. Scooping out all the things we have inside. A knife like that, it can help you a lot while you are doing this very delicate thing. Now, with all this, we are going to use a knife. We are going to use it also for the stuffing, which means that we need to cook it a little bit. Oh, we processing some food. Yes, right now we need to make a sort of meatball. I'm going to use some grounded beef, parsley. Here I have some pieces of prosciutto crudo and a piece of ham. I choose this because this is what I had in the fridge. But you can also substitute another prosciutto crudo with the mortadella. Actually, you could use also some bacon. We need something to spice up our meatball. We need an egg. We place in also the inside of our zucchine. There is a meatball without cheese. So we are going to use some pecorino cheese and some parmigiano. I like every meatball a little bit of breadcrumbs. Now is the moment to stuff our zucchini, which means that we place the stuffing inside, like if you're stuffing a cannolo. Unlike the others, we are not going to bake the zucchini, but we are going to cook the zucchini on a stove with some tomato sauce, because at the end, inside, it's meatball. While the tomato sauce is cooking, I'm going to brown the zucchini a little bit. We need to let them cook, covered in tomato sauce for about 30 minutes, or until, actually, the zucchini is cooked. Remember to stir them a little bit every, I don't know, 10 minutes, because in this way, the zucchini will be evenly cooked. Okay, so the rice-stuffed tomato was your Roman memory. Mine are these stuffed zucchini. Well, I guess you see them in other places in Italy, but it seems particularly in Rome. You'll walk past shops like delis, stuff like that, and they'll sell these pre-stuffed, but the idea is that you take it home and cook it yourself. So they've already made the mix and filled it in, and you just buy these stuffed zucchini or other vegetables that are already filled with this meat mix. That's my Roman memory. I need to say that I'm sorry for my Calabrian friends. I disagree with them because the zucchini, they taste good. No matter what you do with them, they taste always good. In this way, it's pretty easy because, let's be honest, it's a meat, it's a meatball zucchini. Even if you don't like zucchini, stuff them with meatball mix, you're gonna like them. Buon appetito. You still have all the good thing of the zucchini. Yeah. It's actually the taste. Well, even like the meatball mix, because it has the zucchini in it, it doesn't just taste like a normal meatball. It still very much tastes like zucchini, but it's a version of zucchini that even if you despise zucchini and vegetables, you will absolutely love this. Personally, as I said, I really love the zucchini, so for me, it's pretty easy to like them. Who doesn't like a good meatball? This is the healthiest meatball I've ever eaten. All joking aside, if you're looking for some excellent stuffed vegetable dishes that are also perfect for summer, we hope you guys will try some of these recipes. We'll put them all in the video description down below. Speaking of how I used to not like vegetables, and now one of my favorite vegetables is broccoli rabe, specifically when you mix it with sausage. Pasta Grammarians Robin and Kurt made this amazing puccia puliese sandwich. We made a whole video about some amazing panini. You can check it out up here. It is one of the most incredible sandwiches, and you guys did a fantastic job. It looks beyond perfect. All right, we'll see you guys next time. Ciao. Ciao. Okay, I need that other pepper ASAP. No, that's mine, Arthur. Yours? No, that is mine.