Super Bowl Favorites- Wings and Poppers

The Pragmatic Chef's™ Grilled Jalapeño Poppers

For each Popper, you'll need:

1 large fresh Jalapeño Take your time while choosing your peppers. Select large, uniformly sized jalapenos with no soft spots.
1 chunk of Monterey Jack cheese
1 large shrimp, peeled and deveined (31-40 count) Uncooked is best, but you can use cooked shrimp if you have to.
1/2 strip of bacon, parcooked- Cut your strips in half, and microwave about 2-3 minutes.
1 toothpick- Use a plain toothpick, not the colored party ones I used for the picture, and take them out of the package so that you're not putting your hands into the box once they've been handling food.

Okay, let's assemble some poppers. It's best to have everything prepped before you start. Take a jalapeno and make sure it's sitting on the flattest side, so that it doesn't flop over on the grill. Leave the stem on, but if it's helping the pepper to stand up, trim it because the stems will be of no help once they've been cooked. I'm using a tourneé knife here, but it's overkill. Any small paring knife is fine. Normally I would say to never work with a dull knife, but you'll be holding these a lot while you're hollowing them until you get the hang of it, and you don't want to jab a sharp knife into your palm!

Make a horizontal cut starting just above the tip of the pepper, and continue until you get to the seeds. Stop. Carefully make a vertical cut from the top to where it meets the first cut you made. Don't keep going, because as the pepper softens, it'll rip right there. Save the top scrap for something else, or snack on those with some cheese as you continue.

Now that the top's off, use your knife to carefully cut the rest of the core without poking through the side, then run your knife down the length on each side to free the core and seeds. It should pop out in one piece.

Use the back of your knife, a small spoon, or even a grapefruit spoon to remove the rest of the veins. You can leave them if you want, but there's quite a bit of heat there. Your jalapeno will ready to stuff when it looks like this:

Cut a slice of Jack cheese as deep as the pepper. If you've done a good job selecting your peppers, you can pre-slice your cheese, otherwise you'll have to custom cut each one. I cut a slice, then slice it in half as shown:

Take a shrimp, and place it as shown, with the tail of the shrimp at the tip of the pepper:

Almost done! Take your precooked half piece of bacon, lay the thinnest part at the stem end, fold it in half at the tip, so you'll end up with the widest part of the bacon on top, at the widest part of the pepper. (The one in the picture is done the opposite way because of how the piece of bacon is shaped.) Take a toothpick and push it all the way through, making sure that you go through the meaty part of the bacon and through the shrimp so it all stays together. Do a good job with this because they'll be top heavy. Here's one ready for the grill:

Grill these on a nice low heat until the bacon is crisp, the shrimp is cooked, the cheese is bubbling and the pepper is really, really brown. Use a fork to move them around, tongs will squeeze the good stuff out. The longer you cook the jalapeños, the mellower and sweeter they get. Make sure they're really soft and completely cooked.

They can even be cooked more than in the final picture, but the bottoms were dark brown but the sides weren't because I had wings on the grill at the same time, so the peppers were off of direct heat most of the time.