Sweet Potato Hash

Just as I suspected, a game of “what the hell can I make for dinner?” while looking into the fridge was exactly what I needed to break me out of yesterday’s day-long funk. And, if I may, the results were pretty fantastic! If you enjoy cooking and want to improve your ability to, and comfort level with, thinking outside of the box, I suggest playing this game as a once-a-week, clean out the fridge exercise. Not only will it keep you from wasting produce, but it will make you combine ingredients that you wouldn’t necessarily see paired during your 10-minute surf of Pinterest.

Here is what I dug out of the fridge:

(makes up to 4 servings, just increase number of eggs):

• 2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut to 3/4″ cubes
• 1/2 head of cauliflower, broken down into 1/2″ – 3/4″ heads
• 1/2 head red cabbage, rough chopped to about 1/2″ – 3/4″
• 2 medium carrots, peeled, halved lengthwise and fine chopped
• 1/4 white onion, peeled, fine chopped
• 1 leek, green removed, stalk halved lengthwise and fine chopped
• 5 green onion “greens”, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled and fine chopped
• 5 sprigs thyme, leaves removed and minced
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tbsp EVOO
• 1/2 cup beef stock (low sodium)
• salt & pepper
• 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 2 beers, consumed slowly, not at all used in the actual recipe

What Was Left

Bring 6-8 cups of salted water to a boil. While waiting, begin the prep of your vegetables, starting with the sweet potatoes. Once water boils, drop your sweet potatoes in (already cubed). Blanch for 3-5 minutes, then strain and rinse under cold water to stop cooking process. Set aside. Rinse out your pot, refill with fresh water and return to a boil.

Meanwhile, bring a large pan to medium heat and add 1 tbsp EVOO. Add your onions and leek to the pan with a pinch of salt and saute until just turning translucent, approximately 5 minutes. Once your onion and leek start to turn translucent and are aromatic, add your carrots and cauliflower to the pan and saute for another 5 minutes. Next, add your sweet potatoes and garlic. At this point, add the cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, a few pinches of salt and approx. 2 tsp of fresh-cracked black pepper, mixing throughout the ingredients. You may need to add a little more EVOO here to keep your potatoes from sticking as the first several ingredients will have absorbed much of the oil you originally added.

After your potatoes have been in the pan for approximately 10 minutes, add your red cabbage and combine. Simultaneously, add your thyme and beef stock. Let the stock simmer until almost completely absorbed / evaporated, then reduce the heat to simmer, put the lid on your pan, and let the flavors meld for up to 10 minutes.

While your hash is busy getting delicious, it’s time to poach your eggs. There are several ways to poach an egg, and if you have a preferred method, please insert here.

If you have never tried to poach an egg, or have never done so successfully, this method is a pretty good one-  I used the water which I put on to boil after my potatoes were blanched, reducing the heat to low, letting the water settle to a simmer and adding a pinch of salt. Once that’s done, crack one of the eggs into a small dish or bowl (a tea-cup works well). Used a slotted spoon to swirl the water in the pot, creating a vortex. Then, use the bowl or cup and ‘lay’ the egg into the water. Using this method, you keep the egg whites tight. The vortex will cause the egg-whites to swirl and bind to themselves around the yolk, keeping them neat and compact. Repeat with the balance of the eggs. Leave the eggs alone while they are in the water! You don’t need to (or want to) do anything with them other than let the water cook them. Once the egg-whites begin to form a solid and the eggs begin float off the bottom of the pot, use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water and let them dry on a paper towel for a minute. DO NOT cook them longer than 3 minutes. If you wait until they are floating on the surface around minute 4 or 5, they will be cooked through and you will not have any of that beautiful, soft, silky yolk come running out when you cut into your egg.

To serve, spoon they hash onto a plate. Sprinkle your chopped green onions on top of the hash, then add your egg to the center of the hash. Dust the egg with a tiny amount of salt and pepper, and you are ready to eat!

 

The beauty of this dish, as with hash in general, is that your recipe does not need to be strict! Hash has traditionally been a “what do we have available to chop up and cook?” type of meal. That is what makes it perfect for using your odds and ends, similar to a stock or a soup. This recipe will take you about 45 minutes.

In regards to nutrition, depending on your serving size, you are getting anywhere from 1 to 3 servings of vegetables. Sweet potato is a HUGE source of Vitamin A, and contains 0.1g of fat. Other than your EVOO, there is not a high fat content ingredient in this meal. As for the egg, many people think egg and associate it with bad cholesterol. If you do a little bit of research on the nutrition of eggs, you will find approximately 5g of fat (with about 2g being monounsaturated fat vs. 1.5g saturated fat), as well as a high DV% of Vitamins A, D, B-6 and B-12. The one egg used in this dish is good source of proteins which a diet high in fruits and vegetables can lack. If you have an issue with your cholesterol, obviously the egg can be eliminated. To add the creaminess, a small amount of Greek yogurt can be used as an egg substitute. Lastly, you can easily eliminate the beef stock if you wish. For me, it added a great depth of flavor and really enriched the dish. A good, homemade vegetable stock can be used here.

As always, if you give this a try, I hope you like it and make sure to give me your feedback!

ENJOY!

 

New Vegetarian Comfort Food

First, I need to give all of the credit for this recipe to Laura and her award-winning blog, “The First Mess”. You can check it out here: http://www.thefirstmess.com/ 

The recipe caught my eye because every ingredient in it is so damn good for you! Also, I’ve wanted to explore some new curry dishes for a while. Last, but certainly not least, her photography is amazing, you can’t help but want to try it! I will let you take the exact recipe from TFM (the post is dated 10/2/14), but I wanted to add some notes of my own regarding what I did and how it came out.

As you can see from the title of this post, this one-pot meal could very well become a new go-to Fall / Winter comfort food for me. It was incredibly deep and rich! The spices were perfectly balanced, and with just a little bit of bread to soak up the broth…. my god. My life had always revolved around meat-based comfort foods; beef or lamb stew, roasted chicken, beef/pork lasagna, etc… Nothing vegetarian I’d had to date really hit all the spots for me when I consider something a comfort food. This was the first vegetarian dish I’ve had that I can honestly say did not feel like it was lacking anything. Very hearty and satisfying with the perfect amount of heat. 

Okay, so here we go:

Total time, start to finish (less the shopping which I did the day before), this took me about 80 minutes. This is one of those meals where your mise en place needs to be on point. As you are really trying to bring out the aromas and oils (flavor) in your first several ingredients, rather than trying to break them down, you’ll need to move to the next step in a timely fashion or you will lose something from the flavor profile. Now, this is good practice for all of your cooking, but for this one in particular, get your ingredients prepped before anything hits the heat. Do not add the curry and bay leaves to the heat before you mince your garlic and dice your jalapenos. Too much inactive time in the pot (or pan) is generally bad for, well, just about everything in a saute scenario. Similarly, do not add your garlic before you dice your jalapenos. Unless you and another person are working in perfect harmony in your home kitchen (god bless you), you will be doing all this prep yourself. That means that if you add your garlic before the jalapeno is prepped, the garlic will be sitting inactive on the heat as you dice the jalapeno, which in turn means, a) the garlic will start to darken while you clean and dice the pepper and the flavor will get much more harsh than you want it to here, or, b) you’ll rush through the dicing of the jalapeno so as not to burn the garlic and your cutting board COULD end up looking like an operating table in a Civil War field hospital. NOTE: both options are undesired.

 

It says to use waxy potatoes for this dish. USE THEM. Keep in mind, you are essentially boiling the potatoes here. If you do not go with waxy, you will end up with a mess. Also, some of waxy potatoes you find can be downright beautiful, so why not use them!

Wow

The curry I used was just a typical sweet curry. My wife talked me out of picking up the hot curry, and, as usual, she was right. The sweet curry paired with the jalapenos gave this just the right amount of oomph, while still keeping it a comfort food and not a food challenge. If you want this a little hotter, I would still go with the sweet curry, and either turn up the heat with another pepper variety, or with a favorite hot sauce.

Don’t be nervous about leaving the bay leaves in there. I used dried leaves, and brought it all the way up the final stages of cooking before removing. They are easy to spot before the kale goes in.

Last step

If you hit the potatoes and cauliflower with salt and pepper before adding the tomatoes, make sure you check it again before you add the kale and chickpeas. Tomato will change the profile, especially if you go with canned, and what you thought was enough pepper may need a few more twists. Add the chickpeas first and get them incorporated into the pot so they can soak up that flavor while the kale wilts. Do this before the kale goes in, because once it does it will go EVERYWHERE when you stir, and your relaxing evening of cooking turns into three minutes of,

• “When was the last time I cleaned the stove?”
• “Will the dog eat kale?”
• “The 5-second rule is totally legitimate, right?”.

Also, if you do go with a 28oz. can of crushed tomatoes, you may want to have some plum tomatoes on hand (if there are in season, which they always are in FL) to dice up and throw in there. This brightens up the sauce (or broth) a little bit.

For me, make sure you remove the stems (spine) from the kale. If you wish, you can simply rough-chop it and dump it in, but I found that since you are only wilting the kale, it retains a good bit of crunch on its own (and really adds a nice texture). The stems just will not tenderize in the same amount of time, and you could end up with something…different. But, that’s an individual preference; all you’ll end up with is a little more of a crunch and a slightly different flavor than you get from just the leaves.

You can make this dish a soup or a stew by varying the amount of vegetables and the amount of vegetable stock you use. I prefer my one-pot style meals to be on the hearty side, so went heavy on the cauliflower, potatoes and kale, while keeping the vegetable stock around the 1-cup amount that was called for.

Now for the nutrition: This dish is PACKED with good-for-you. Kale and cauliflower are both part of the cruciferous vegetable family (including broccoli, cabbage, etc…) which are some the healthiest vegetables you can consume. They are loaded with vitamins and minerals, and contain some of the best antioxidant bang-for-the-buck out there. Chickpeas (or garbanzo beans) are loaded with fiber, minerals and antioxidants, and are also supposed to be linked to heart health. While I am no nutritionist, and I believe that everyone’s health depends on their own unique set of needs, anyone would be hard pressed to find a major fault with this dish as it relates to health and nutrition.

Anyway, if you are looking for a relatively simple departure from your stand-by stews or soups this fall, I highly recommend digging the curry out of your cabinet, grabbing that bunch of organic kale that you walk by every time you go to the grocery store, and spending 80 minutes whipping up something that tastes amazing and is amazing for you.

ENJOY!