The first time I had jalapeño poppers was in high school working at Walmart part-time… I know what you’re thinking – not another food blogger sharing her life story before sharing the recipe! Well, first off, I’m not a food blogger because I rarely ever cook. Second, I will share the recipe, but the recipe is more of a guideline since I tend to get impatient when it comes to cooking.

Anyway, back to the story, I had poppers for the first time while working part-time at Walmart. I was on lunch break with my supervisor, and she recommended that I try the fried jalapeño poppers at the hot deli section. I love fried food, so the poppers at Walmart were really good in my opinion.

Cooking Jalapeño Poppers with Bacon

Recently, I’ve been going to this local dive bar that’s right next to my place and they have these delicious bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers! The bar serves 5 poppers in each order, and I can probably eat at least 3 orders of them. That’s how much I love them, ha. As I was eating them, they didn’t seem that hard to make, so I looked up some recipes and tried to recreate the bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers.

Ingredients

• 5 jalapeños
• 5 slices of bacon
• ~4 oz of cream cheese
• ~1/2 cup of mozzarella
• ~1 teaspoon of onion powder
• ~1/2 teaspoon of salt
• ~1/2 teaspoon of pepper

I bought 5 jalapeños and cut them in half, which will make a total of 10 poppers. What makes the jalapeños spicy are the seeds and the ribs – this is really helpful for how spicy or not spicy you want the jalapeño poppers to be. This was the most time-consuming part of the preparation.

Stuffing the Jalapeño Poppers

For the stuffing, I used cream cheese, and the recipe I was following used cheddar cheese, but I didn’t have any, so I used mozzarella instead. I also added in onion powder, salt, and pepper for the jalapeño popper stuffing.

For the bacon, it was recommended to use regular bacon and not the thick-cut ones. Cut the bacon in half lengthwise, so for 10 poppers, you would need 5 slices of bacon in order to cut 10 strips of bacon to wrap the jalapeño. The first time I made the poppers, I wrapped the bacon pretty tightly on and I noticed that the stuffing would spill out of the wrap.

Once all of that has been assembled, I baked the jalapeño poppers at 400° F degrees for about 40-50 minutes. I typically like to check in with the poppers every 10-15 minutes just to make sure the bacon is baked and crispy to my liking.

Cooking as a Love Language

I’ve made bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers twice now and have also been dabbling in other recipes as well. It’s been a while since I’ve cooked in general and there’s something about cooking for others too. I’ve made chicken wings, cronuts, and stuffed peppers for my friends. I think cooking food for people I love has slowly become one of my newest love languages. Even if the food isn’t good, I know they can see the love and effort I put in!