Category: sweet potato

Bacon & Sweet Potato Jalapeño Boats

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This was an experiment that Heather and I have been tossing up back and forth for about two weeks now.  We weren’t sure exactly how to execute it, but we finally pulled the trigger yesterday morning when we decided we were going to attend our first meat-up hosted by Stacy and Matt, of Paleo Parents fame.  We have lived in this area for some time and always had or found an excuse to not go, but it was absolutely amazing!  We also spent some time chatting with The Domestic Man.  Both of these blogs are great resources, if you’re not already aware of them.
If you are in the Northern Virginia area, I highly suggest you attend. If not, try to get together with friends monthly–the positive reinforcement and social gathering is very powerful.


Ok, enough preaching.  We threw these together for the gathering, and while I’m not sure they were perfect, I was pretty happy with the outcome.  The idea started as another “bacon-wrapped jalapeño” fill-in-the-blank, but then grew into a twice-baked sweet potato fantasy.  Here’s what you’ll need to make your own:

  • 2 large sweet potatoes
  • 6 strips Whole30 friendly bacon
  • 10 jalapeños, halved and cleaned
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper
  • smoked paprika (for sprinkling)

 Preparation:

1.  Chop bacon into small chunks, peel (and shred) sweet potatoes, and halve and deseed jalapeños.
2.  Sautee bacon over medium heat to soften (no more than 2 minutes) and then add shredded sweet potato.
3.  Cook for 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
4.  Once cooked through, allow to cool and then place into blender or large bowl to mash.  Add salt and pepper.  At this point, preheat oven to 375ºF.
5.  With a spoon/spatula, fill jalapeño shells with mashed bacon and sweet potato mixture.
6.  Bake for 10-12 minutes.
7.  Remove and sprinkle with roasted paprika.
These were very hot, I think in large part due to the fact that Whole Foods only had gigantic jalapeños. Smaller sized peppers would definitely help.  Also try this mixture in mushroom caps or non-spicy peppers.  It is a great flavor finger food that’s also pretty filling.  We hope you enjoy!

Pesto- and Avocado-Stuffed Chicken

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This post is well over due… oops! Last week, we had two small chickens (they were on sale at the store, packaged together, so we couldn’t resist even though they were not on our shopping list) and we needed to find someway to make use of them or else butcher them further to freeze the parts. Freezing a whole chicken is something I’ve never attempted, nor do I ever want to; and cutting it up to freeze it in pieces just seemed like so much work. :p

So, instead, we nixed a one or two other planned meals and made the chickens. Tuesday night, after dinner, I set to making homemade pesto for our first roast chicken. Brent or I (honestly, I don’t remember who’s idea it was) thought stuffing the chicken with pesto would be more interesting that the standard lemon and garlic roast chicken. In addition, to try adding texture and substance, we agreed we’d crisp up some of the shredded white sweet potato (seriously, we had a lot of this stuff–it’s gone into a ton of recipes lately!) and add that plus some avocado to the chicken cavity.


Ok, so here we go with official ingredients and process…

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup pine nuts
  • 8 cloves of garlic
  • 1/2 cup olive oil
  • 1 package of basil (about 3 to 4 cups)
  • 1 whole chicken (ours was about 2 and 1/2 pounds)
  • 1/2 an avocado
  • 1/4 cup of shredded white sweet potato
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 2 tablespoons of olive oil (or enough olive oil to brush over the entire chicken)
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Blend the olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, basil and a pinch of salt in a food processor or blender. Ta da! You now have a very basic, homemade pesto. 🙂
3. Spread out the shredded white sweet potato on a baking sheet. Bake in the over for about 20 to 25 minutes, or until at least some are crispy.
Meanwhile, prepare the chicken: remove any gizzards and other internal business, rinse it under cold water, and pat dry with a paper towel. Place on the rack in your roasting pan.
4. Brush the entire chicken (top, bottom and sides, but not the inside) with olive oil.
5. Chop the half of avocado.
6. Gently mix the avocado, shredded sweet potato and pesto together in a medium bowl.
7. Using a big spoon, ladle or your hands to scoop the pesto mixture into the cavity of the chicken.
8. Sprinkle the chicken with a little salt and pepper–as much as you like. Also, tie the legs closed with cooking twine.
9. Roast in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes per pound, until a meat thermometer reads 175 degrees when inserted into the breast of the chicken.
We like to roast our chickens closer to 20 minutes per pound because you can always cook more if it comes out under done; you can’t undo overcooking.
Our chicken came out incredibly moist, and the skin was just a little crispy. If you like really crispy skin, crank up the heat at the beginning or the end for about 10 to 20 minutes.
When serving, make sure you scoop out some of the sweet and savory pesto mixture from inside the chicken. I’ll admit, I was a bit leery of the combination of avocado, sweet potato, and pesto; but it was really tasty! Some sweet, some salt, some savory, a little crisp from the skin and a good portion of creamy goodness from the stuffing over the slices of moist chicken breast… delicious!

Butternut Squash and White Sweet Potato Breakfast Hash

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Two weeks ago, we made that awesome Paleo Butternut Squash from Health-Bent.com with our own homemade sausage. (I can’t emphasize enough how delicious it was. It was so delicious!)

Now, not knowing what a “small butternut squash” really meant, we purchased a butternut squash that turned out to be much larger than necessary for that recipe. What did we do all the leftovers? Well, for nearly two weeks, it’s been sitting in a plastic container in our fridge. Finally, this morning I said for perhaps the 10th time in the past two weeks, “we need to find a way to use that butternut squash.” And Brent’s response was perfect: what about a hash?
Brilliant. 🙂
We also had plenty of leftover shredded white sweet potato, onions, and bell peppers. So, here’s is my latest variation on breakfast hash. 
Ingredients:
  • 2 tablespoons Ghee
  • 3 cups Butternut Squash, diced
  • 4 cups shredded white sweet potato (diced would be great too, ours just happened to be shredded from our experimental lasagna)
  • 1 large red bell pepper (approx. 1-1.5 cups)
  • 1 cup onion (I used one and a half small yellow onions)
  • Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
  1. Heat the Ghee in a large skillet over medium-high heat.
  2. Sauté the onion and butternut squash for about 2-3 minutes, until the onion is nearly translucent.
  3. Add the shredded white sweet potato and continue sautéing for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly.
  4. Add the red bell pepper and continue sautéing and stirring for another 2-3 minutes or until the sweet potato is cooked through (it should change color from bright, starchy white to a dull ivory, almost like onion just before turning translucent).
  5. If you want to add a little seasoning, like salt and/or pepper, sprinkle a pinch over the dish during the last minute or two of cooking.
  6. Serve hot or cold.
Here are a few pictures of the process:
I think this new breakfast hash was really successful! I made a lot of it so we could portion it out for breakfast for at least a few days this week. We’ve been eating so many scrambled eggs and egg muffins this month, Brent and I are looking forward to this change of pace. 
You could easily use regular sweet potato, shredded or diced, and of course toss in green or yellow or orange bell peppers if you like/have them laying around. 
Lately, our grocery store has had very few regular sweet potatoes in stock and [oddly] has had lots of white sweet potatoes at the same price per pound of the few regular ones on the shelf. So, we’ve bought more white than regularly the past couple of weeks. However, there’s no flavor difference that I can tell. But I will say, I think the white sweet potato prevents the whole dish from getting too orange. I would have loved to toss in a green bell pepper for more color vibrance, but we simply didn’t have one on hand. 
One final note: We love for our food to have a little heat, but I am well aware of my own lack of understanding in applying spices. If I’m not following a recipe, and Brent is too busy to lend a hand, I won’t experiment with that domain. This butternut squash and white sweet potato breakfast hash is naturally sweet and could easily support a little kick–so jazz it up for yourself.
And let us know what you think! What spices would you add? 

A new take on an old favorite: Lasagna

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White Sweet Potato & Ground Beef Lasagna

Last week, Brent and I tried two recipes that tingled our tastebuds and left us eager to experiment.

First, Health-Bent’s Paleo Butternut Squash Lasagna. We used our homemade sausage and it was OMG delicious. And it was beautiful too. 🙂 We  gobbled it up in just a few meals, and it left us craving more. Thank you Health-Bent.com!!!

Second, we tried to follow a new spaghetti recipe, one that broke the typical Paleo mold of using spaghetti squash. Enter, PaSketti: Sweet Potato Spaghetti. Brent recently found the Paleo Parents’ website and I’ve been a little obsessed lately. 🙂 They are an inspiration. Seriously, a family with three growing boys successfully living a Paleo lifestyle?! I had wondered if it were possible, and it seems it is. I think I might actually be coming over the side of full-time Paleo for the rest of my life… maybe… almost. Brent is probably there; but I’m not totally sold on giving up cake forever just yet.

Anyways, back to the PaSketti: The white shredded sweet potato–the Giant was oddly out of regular sweet potatoes–looked a lot more like Spaetzle and got me really craving a good, ol’ fashioned Schnitzel with Spaetzle (yep, my family is German). So sometime this week or next, I might toy around with that idea.

Meanwhile, I made my own tomato sauce for the PaSketti, but I misjudged how much I needed and ultimately the entire dish turned out to be more like a brown-greyish mush. BUT IT WAS DELICIOUS. I mean, wow!  Salty, savory, beefy… and there was a slight gravy-like quality to it. Brent and I couldn’t get enough, and it was gone way faster than we expected… portion control? Sometimes we’re not so good at that, haha.

Fast forward to this past Saturday when we were making our weekly grocery list. The amazing flavors of the Health-Bent lasagna and Paleo Parents PaSketti still lingering in our memories. Brent had an idea: why not add shredded sweet potato to the lasagna? Then, we thought, why not just use the sweet potato instead of the butternut squash? Also, we were all out of our homemade sausage; but, lasagna often uses ground beef. We had plenty of that in the freezer. So, out it came.

Sunday, after completing our shopping on Saturday and having defrosted the ground beef (and some other things I’ll mention in another post) overnight, we dove into cooking.

To make the lasagna, we started with shredding the sweet potato with our crazy food processor. 
 
I also roasted a lot of tomatoes (12 to be exact–I had to do it in two batches) at 400 degrees F for 25 minutes.
Borrowing from the PaSketti recipe, we sautéed our 2 pounds of ground beef with 1 medium onion, 3 celery stalks and four or five cloves of garlic. (Note: Looking back, we wish we’d added more; perhaps a little kick from red pepper flakes, extra garlic and onion, or even just some salt and pepper to this mix.)

After the tomatoes were roasted, I simmered them on medium-low to cook them down a little further. Brent added a healthy dose of “pizza seasoning” (a mix of oregano, garlic, crushed red pepper, etc.).

Meanwhile, we preheated the oven to 400 degrees F.

Once all the parts were ready, we began the layering process. Sauce, ground beef mix, shredded white sweet potato, repeat.

We finished it off with sauce on top. (We actually used all the ground beef mix and most of the sauce, but because we shredded three large sweet potatoes, we still have a lot of that left over.) We covered it with the corning wear’s glass top and placed it in the oven for 35 minutes.

Our first plates didn’t look to pretty, so I took a picture of the dish instead with our first pieces cut out. It’s not the most stable of layered lasagnas; and, again, it could have used some more spices. We like our food to bite back a little 😉 But for an experiment, I think it turned out rather well.

And if my word isn’t good enough for you, just know that we have plowed through almost this entire corning wear dish in less than 24 hours. There’s honestly only one large piece (or two small pieces… ha, right) left of this goodness.

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Sweet Potato and Egg Hash

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Word to the wise: this is a great way to use leftover ingredients.

I’ve been making eggs every morning for the past week. They’ve been quite yummy–onion, red and green bell pepper, a little salt and pepper–but I wanted something different this morning.

Meanwhile, Brent wanted two plain eggs (scrambled, his favorite) and there were only three eggs left in our refrigerator. So I made Brent his eggs, and then looked around for something to add to my single egg that would give it substance.

What can I say? I’m a hearty breakfast on the weekends kind of girl. 😉

I grabbed a sweet potato, some leftover bell peppers and onion, the egg and some olive oil.

Don’t worry, I didn’t try to use that entire sweet potato. Here are the actual measurements of those ingredients I ended up using:

2/3 cup sweet potato diced
1/2 cup red bell pepper diced
1/2 cup green bell pepper diced
1/4 cup onion diced
1 egg
1/2 tablespoon olive oil

Step 1: Heat the olive oil over medium-high, then toss in sweet potato and onion. Sauté until the sweet potatoes are just a little soft (about 3-5 minutes, I think; I actually walked away to put on laundry and then tasted one little piece of sweet potato).

Step 2: Mix in the bell peppers. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes. This will get them tender, but not too soft. I like my bell peppers with just the slightest crunch to them.

Doesn’t that look beautiful?! 🙂

Step 3: Take half of the hash mix out of the pan, pour in the egg (previously beaten in a bowl), mix it around, and then toss the other half of the hash mix back into the pan.

Step 4: Keep mixing everything with a fork (or flipped spatula) until the egg is fully cooked.

Step 5: Enjoy!

This turned out to be quite delicious. Hearty, but not heavy, and the balance of ingredients was perfect. Of course, there was too much for me to eat on my own. So after eating about half, Brent ate the rest for me. He was pleasantly surprised by it. 🙂

P.S. If you want, throw in some spices! Next time, I will. I bet a little salt, paprika and cinnamon would be pretty awesome.