Devil pepper!

I like making a few seasonally-appropriate dinners around Halloween. Usually it's pretty traditional fare -- Dinner in a Pumpkin or pumpkin soup served in a hollowed-out pumpkin shell or the like -- but this time I noticed a recipe for jack o' lantern stuffed peppers, presented by the inimitable Chef John himself. Everyone in our family likes stuffed peppers (yes, including Charlie, but he never gets any) and I knew orange peppers were on sale this week, so off to the store I went!

This time I pulled a mix-and-match recipe swap and filled the peppers with braaaains stuffed the peppers with another Chef John recipe (if you try it, be forewarned: this recipe creates enough stuffing to fill 8 peppers, not 4). Three of the four peppers were orange, and they made great jack o' lanterns, but I had a fourth pepper that was red.

It had to become THE DEVIL PEPPER.

Behold His Infernal Majesty!

The photo makes it kind of hard to see (yes, that's my glorious "Happy Halloween" bleach shirt in the background), but I created a couple of little devil horns from the pepper offcuts and stuck them on his head using toothpicks. They blackened up in the oven to create a nice, properly demonic effect.

Shortly after this picture was taken, Mr. Devil Pepper was doused in marinara "blood" sauce and scarfed with great glee.

So long, Devil Pepper. You were demonically delicious.

Oh yeah, and if you're stuck with more pepper filling than you need and wondering what you should do with it, may I suggest making Italian meatballs? (That's what we did. Super tasty!)