Bell peppers with rice (p. 292)

There aren't many TJOC recipes that utterly fail for me but it does occasionally happen. Bell peppers with rice (p. 292) was one of these recipes. I will admit to not 100% following the recipe (I instead followed my mom's bad advice) but that wasn't the only problem.

As most of you know, I don't like bell peppers, so I tend to make the pepper recipes for my mom.

I hollowed out four bell peppers:



Problem 1: TJOC recommends to steam the peppers for ten minutes. That seemed ridiculous and my mother, a seasoned (teehee!) pepper maker thought it seemed like a asinine step, so I didn't do it.

I then mixed the filling. Mom thought that brown rice would be better than white rice and whipped some up. Poor rice-making skills must run in the family because it wasn't nearly done enough. She thought it was fine, so I mixed it with Cheddar cheese, chicken stock, basil, and a little black pepper:



I filled the peppers and noticed problem 2: they were only about 3/4 full and looked ridiculous.



After they were baked they looked even worse:



The peppers didn't seem tender but I figured that was fine because mom was going to have to cook them again when she heated them up in the future. Even that didn't make the peppers tender enough. Mom said they were undercooked and amazingly bland.

Mom's solution to this was to add tomato sauce and more cheese to the peppers. Still didn't help. Has anyone else made this recipe? Did you have more success? Even I knew these didn't look good and I wouldn't know a good stuffed pepper if it hit me in the face.