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Prepared by: Marina Zolotseva
10/05/2015 Cooking time: 1 hour 30 minutes
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This bright, original, satisfying and simple recipe for pumpkin stuffed with meat and rice with mushrooms will help diversify your slightly boring daily menu. Be sure to try to replicate the dish at home.
Description of preparation:
This delicious pumpkin, stuffed with meat and rice at home, will even decorate the holiday table.
You can also use mushrooms (as in this case), vegetables, and any spices to taste as filling. Also use the meat you like: pork, chicken or beef. Purpose: For lunch / For dinner / For the holiday table / Festive lunch / Healthy lunch / Family dinner Main ingredient: Meat / Vegetables / Pumpkin / Mushrooms / Cereals / Rice Dish: Whole dishes / Stuffed
Cooking rice in pumpkin, baked in the oven:
Step 1: Prepare the pumpkin for baking.
A small pumpkin is suitable for stuffing and subsequent baking in the oven. I won’t name a specific variety, any will do, there will just be some differences in taste. But until you have formed certain preferences, take the one that you like visually. We wash the pumpkin and cut it in one of two ways: either lengthwise in half to make two pumpkin “dishes” that can be stuffed both, or cut off the top of the pumpkin to make a pumpkin “pot with a lid”. Then carefully scrape out all the pulp and seeds with a spoon, you can use a knife (but cut carefully so as not to make holes in our “dishes”). How much pulp to remove is up to you, how much patience you have, since the pulp of raw pumpkin is quite strong. Of course, the more pulp you scrape out, the more room there will be for the filling. We will also use the pulp, so chop it finely and put it in a separate plate. For the filling we need a small amount of pulp, and you can use the rest for another dish. To soften the pumpkin a little before stuffing, pour boiling water into it and leave until it cools completely.
Step 2: Prepare the pumpkin filling.
You can also take any rice, depending on what you want the future filling to be like; if it’s more crumbly, then it’s long-grain rice; if it’s in the form of porridge, then it’s more sticky, round rice. We rinse the rice several times so that the water in which we wash it remains clear. Then put the rice into a saucepan, add water (the water should cover the rice by 2 cm) and cook until half cooked for 10 minutes, drain the water and turn off the stove.
Finely chop the tomatoes, onions and garlic. Add oil to the frying pan, preferably olive, but sunflower will do, salt, spices and heat it up a little. When you smell the aroma, add the onion and garlic to the pan and fry them for 2-3 minutes. Then add tomatoes and pumpkin pulp to the vegetables and continue frying. It's time to add rice and finely chopped greens to the frying pan, mix the filling properly, fry for another 1-2 minutes, and then turn off the stove. And turn on the oven to preheat.
Step 3: Stuff and bake the pumpkin.
We spread the resulting mixture into the pumpkin, observing some subtleties: do not compact the filling, but place it loosely
, and leave a little space so that the rice can swell quietly during cooking. Otherwise, the pumpkin may simply fall apart, either already in the oven or on your table, which would be very disappointing. Add 40-50 ml of water, put a small piece of butter, and transfer the pumpkin to a baking sheet. To make it bake faster, you need to wrap it in foil. Bake the pumpkin stuffed with rice in the oven at 180-200 degrees for an hour and a half, until cooked. The baking time depends on the size of the pumpkin, so, unfortunately, it will not be possible to indicate it exactly. Keep an eye on the oven, and when the pumpkin skin browns and it becomes softer, you can open the foil and check the readiness of both the filling and the pumpkin itself.
Step 4: Serve the pumpkin baked rice.
We serve the rice, of course, in a pumpkin, which is what makes this dish so good - its spectacular appearance. You can eat the rice directly from the pumpkin, or cut the pumpkin itself into portions; the filling will then inevitably fall out. But the taste will remain just as wonderful. Bon appetit!
You can make the filling for the pumpkin sweet, in which case the rice will be accompanied by dried fruits and nuts.
To prevent the melon from collapsing during baking and to simply be more stable, you can surround it, for example, with apples. They will absorb the sweetish pumpkin juice and will also surprise your guests.
Rice can be replaced with millet porridge.
Instead of foil, you can cover the pumpkin with a “lid” - the cut off top, or make a simple dough of flour and water, roll it out with a flat cake and cover the pumpkin with it.
I know that many people do not like either pumpkin or rice porridge. I'm not a fan of these products myself, but this recipe for oven-baked pumpkin stuffed with sweet rice won me over. Really delicious! Apparently, the point is a large number of dried fruits, nuts and spices, which turned ordinary rice porridge into something special. And also butter, which made the filling soft, silky, and creamy. And the pumpkin turned out well - small, dense, slightly sweet, but without too pronounced a pumpkin smell.
I don’t know the exact name of this variety; it appeared here relatively recently: its pulp, when cooked, does not turn into porridge, but is something like spaghetti - individual thin fibers with a delicate taste. And the weight of such a pumpkin is optimal for stuffing - the fruit weighing 500 g is quickly baked in the oven, and when serving it can be cut in half, resulting in two portioned “plates” filled with hot, aromatic rice.
The dish should be eaten by grasping the soft walls of the oven-baked pumpkin so that its pulp is mixed with the filling. I think that regular pumpkin can be used for this recipe. In this case, the baking time in the oven will increase, the proportions of the ingredients also need to be changed in proportion to the weight of the pumpkin, and when serving, spicy rice with fruits and nuts is laid out on plates along with the pumpkin pulp.
Ingredients for 4 servings:
How to cook “Pumpkin stuffed with meat and rice”
1. Wash and dry the pumpkin, carefully cut off the top. Take a ripe, juicy and bright one, so that the pumpkin stuffed with meat and rice at home will delight you with both appearance and taste.
2. Carefully remove the seeds using a spoon. Add salt and pepper to vegetable oil. Stir and use a brush to coat thoroughly inside and out. It is better to place a dense pumpkin in a preheated oven and cook until soft.
3. Now you can move on to the filling. Wash, dry and chop the meat. Heat a little oil in a frying pan and fry the meat until half cooked. Add a little salt to taste.
4. Boil the rice until half cooked, adding salt. Drain off excess liquid and dry the cereal a little.
5. Another ingredient used in this meat and rice stuffed pumpkin recipe is mushrooms. Heat the butter in a frying pan. Fry chopped onion and garlic until transparent. Wash the mushrooms, dry and chop. Place in a frying pan and fry until almost done. Salt and pepper to taste.
6. In a deep bowl, combine rice, meat, and mushrooms. Add grated cheese and cream. Stir and pour the filling into the pumpkin. Cover with the top of the pumpkin (pre-cut) and place in the preheated oven for at least 1 hour.
7. That's the whole simple recipe for pumpkin stuffed with meat and rice. Serve whole and then cut into portions.
Rice baked in pumpkin in the oven: recipe
I highly recommend starting to prepare this dish with pumpkin. It needs to be washed and dried well. You never know how difficult a vegetable will be to process.
Place the pumpkin on a horizontal surface. My pumpkin is slightly skewed, so in order to cut the “lid” evenly, I had to place a small pumpkin under it. We insert the knife into the pumpkin at an angle so that it does not fall inside the pumpkin.
We cut in a circle, trying to insert the knife deeply, to the center. In this case, the pumpkin “lid” will remain in your hands.
Cut through the flesh until the pumpkin “fills” with seeds. We take out all the seeds and the fibers connecting them; Scrape out the inner surface of the pumpkin. Cut the edible pulp that remains on the lid from cutting the pumpkin to the seeds into pieces, put it in a saucepan, add a small amount of water and simmer over low heat until softened.
Let's start with the filling. Measure out the required amount of rice.
Pour it into a fine sieve and rinse thoroughly until the water runs clear. Then add water in a ratio of 1:2 (two parts water to one part rice), season with a small pinch of salt and cook until almost done.
While the rice is cooking, boil the water. Scatter the prepared raisins and poppy seeds into cups and pour boiling water over them to steam. Cups need to be covered with saucers.
Our rice is ready.
It's time to take on the apple - we take it last so that the flesh of the fruit does not darken. Cut the apple into small pieces and mix with rice.
Add steamed raisins and poppy seeds to the rice (drain off the excess water!).
We break the stewed pumpkin with a blender and add the pumpkin puree to the rice.
And the finishing touch is honey. We add it to taste.
Place the filling into the pumpkin, leaving a little free space for the rice to steam (it will increase in volume). Place a slice of butter on top. Cover the pumpkin with a “lid”.
This pumpkin takes quite a long time to prepare—about an hour and a half. It all depends on the fruit and the thickness of its walls. Considering that the filling is almost ready for use, the pumpkin itself serves as a sign that the dish is ready: pierce it with a fork; The cutlery should easily fit into the flesh of the improvised baking pot. Baking mode: 180-200 degrees.
If you want to prepare a tasty, aromatic and original dish for lunch, then stuffed pumpkin baked in the oven with rice!
Recipe for stuffed baked pumpkin with meat
To prepare baked pumpkin with meat you need:
- whole pumpkin, round in shape, weighing about 2.0 - 2.5 kg;
- pork – 0.6 – 0.7;
- salt to taste;
- carrots – 90 – 100 g;
- onions – 100 g;
- vegetable oil – 50 ml;
- butter – 60 – 70 g;
- ground pepper to taste;
- water or broth - 100 - 150 ml;
- rice – 50 g.
Read: Recipes for white cabbage cutlets
Recipe:
- Rinse the rice, add a small amount of water to the cereal, heat to a boil and cook for about 4 - 5 minutes. If there is any water left, drain it.
- Wash the pumpkin. Cut off the top. Select seeds. Carefully select the pulp so that the walls of the pumpkin become thinner and the capacity inside is larger. Finely chop the selected pulp.
- Pour oil into a frying pan and fry the pre-chopped onion until soft.
- Cut the pork into small pieces and add to the onion, fry for 5 - 6 minutes.
- Place coarsely grated carrots and pumpkin pulp into the meat and fry everything together for another 5 - 6 minutes.
- Add rice to the meat and vegetables, add salt and pepper to taste, mix everything well.
- Grease the inside of the prepared pumpkin with half the amount of butter and add salt.
- Place the meat filling inside the pumpkin and add a small amount of broth or water. Place the remaining butter on top. Cover the pumpkin with the cut top.
- Place the pumpkin with meat on a baking sheet in the center of the oven. Cook for about 90 minutes. The oven temperature should be 190 degrees.
Serve the pumpkin on a platter, cutting it into slices like an orange.
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