Spicy Tuna Stuffed Peppers Recipe

I'm famous for wanting to recreate yummy dishes that I sample at restaurants. Most recently, I've fallen in love with a spicy sushi tuna dish from a small unsuspecting sushi restaurant located in Los Angeles.   If all of my wildest dreams were to come true, I'd have sushi every day.  Unfortunately, each experience at a sushi restaurant increases my likelihood to exposure to wheat (a primary ingredient in soy sauce and imitation crab).

So I thought to myself "I've got nothing to loose," I'm going to replicate this dish at home.

I started off with some fresh cubed tuna and began cutting them up into smaller pieces.

 

Next I added chopped scallions and red pepper flakes for a little heat. Then comes a mix of mayo and hot chilli sauce (Sriracha) to create the spicy tuna sauce.  I add the tuna and chilli sauce directly to the tuna that way I can mix as I go along without over saturating the meat.

My most favorite finishing touch to any sushi product is the eel sauce (which thankfully doesn't contain any eel in the ingredient list).  I found a simple recipe online which included equal parts of gluten free soy sauce, sugar, and Mirin, a Japanese style cooking wine. I mix all three ingredients (in equal parts of 1 tablespoon each) in a pan on the stove.  I stir consistently until the mixture starts to bubble.  Finally, I transferred the sauce into a bowl and allowed it to cool and thicken.  The final result tasted just like eel sauce from the restaurant (except it was gluten free).   Next time I'll reduce the amount of sugar.  Although the sauce was amazing, my palate doesn't require a high level of sweetness to fully enjoy it.

Then comes the most amazing part, the pepper.  The original recipe calls for the pepper to be breaded with tempura and fried.  I opted not to bread and fry my version of this copy cat recipe. Instead, I simply sautee my pepper on the stove.  The first time I created this dish, I used jalapeno peppers.   I found that the jalapenos were a bit too small and made the dish more of an appetizer rather than a meal. This time I used some jumbo sized (mild) peppers which I enjoyed eating immensely.  For those of you who are squirming at the thought of eating a whole pepper, you can rest easy knowing that the heat is reduced greatly (almost eliminated) when the peppers are cooked.  

The last step in the process is dizzling a little eel sauce and voila!  So freakin' good!  I can't wait to experiment with some of my favorite sushi dishes and see how that turns out.