These days I make this dish with lean ground turkey but the traditional is made with pork. For a most authentic taste use Hungarian wax peppers (image below), if it’s not available any other sweet pepper will give you a lovely tasty meal. Good choice to make for friends and family and most children love the meatballs in tomato sauce too.

Ingredients – 4 portions

For the filling

• 500 g ground meat, pork (but works well with turkey or beef too)
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp of sour cream
• 1 medium onion
• 4 peppers
• 1 egg
• 125 g rice
• 1 teaspoon of Hungarian paprika powder
• salt, pepper

For the tomato sauce:

• 2 tins of chopped tomatoes
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 140 g concentrated tomato paste
• 150 g celeriac (optional)
• 700 ml water
• 1 bunch of parsley
• salt, pepper
• 1 tablespoon of sugar

How to make

1. Finely chop the onion and cook in a little oil, till translucent, add the ground meat and the crushed garlic.
2. Pre-cook the rice till half done
3. Combine half-cooked rice with the meat onion and garlic mixture work in a beaten egg and the salt, paprika, pepper, taking care that the spices and egg are evenly distributed throughout.
4. Prepare the peppers by cutting their top of by the stem and taking the core out, fill each pepper “tube” with the spicy rice and mince mixture, they to be filled firmly but not extremely tight as the cooking rice will expand inside.
5. You will be left with some stuffing mixture that didn’t go to the peppers form small meatballs about egg size from these and set aside.
6. For the tomato sauce, bring the chopped tomatoes to the boil, add the 700ml water and the tomato paste, reduce heat to simmering point.
   lower the stuffed peppers and the meatballs into the tomato sauce and cook for 20 minutes on medium heat.
7. Take out the peppers and meatballs and add chopped celeriac to the tomato sauce if using. Cook till the celeriac is soft.
8. Finally puree the sauce in an electric blender or with a hand-held mixer, place the stuffed peppers and meatballs back into the tomato sauce and warm the whole dish up again.
9. Serve a pepper and a meatball for each person with a bit of tomato sauce on top and  parsley potatoes as a side dish.