Tag: sweet potatoes

Tofu, asparagus and roasted sweet potatoes

No fancy cookbook recipes for this meal. Nope. This was a wing it sort of night. And it worked. So I’ll tell you what I remember about what I did.

I cut the tofu into thick slices. In a large pan that would hold them all without overlapping, I mixed a little soy sauce, black chinese vinegar, chili oil and a minced clove of garlic. The tofu hung out in there while I prepped sweet potatoes and asparagus. It got flipped at some point. Then I fried it up on a cast iron grill pan heavily coated with spray oil.

The sweet potatoes were diced small, so they’d cook faster, tossed with olive oil,  rosemary and salt and baked at about 400 F for around 10 minutes. Then I added a little minced garlic, stirred them up and baked another 10 minutes give or take.

The asparagus were sauteed in olive oil with, yes, minced garlic. Part way through cooking, I squeezed a half a lemon over them. Oh, and salt happened. Salt always happens.

Tada! Quickie meal!

A Southern Dinner

Friday night I made Kevin really happy by cooking something that was fried. I had starred this recipe for Country Fried Seitan Steak in Google Reader and planned to cook it some time this week. I already had the seitan, so just need to bread it, fry it and make the gravy. Oh, and make the collards and cook sweet potatoes to mash. It was a whole stove kind of meal.

I wouldn’t change anything about the seitan steaks. The breading was lovely. Seasoned nicely. The gravy seemed a bit bland to me so I added two tablespoons of nutritional yeast. Perfect! The sweet potatoes I steamed in the pressure cooker. It all came together really well but isn’t the kind of meal I would make on a standard week night. Too much work and too many dirty dishes. To add to the chaos, I was also baking off a whole wheat sandwich bread that turned out to be just cool enough to slice and eat with dinner.

Corndog Bread, what?

Okay, so I still have a serious backlog of VeganMofo posts to read. But I have made it through a bunch of posts and marked a ton for future fixin’. One of those was Corndog Bread. Oh hell yeah! I knew I’d have to get on that pretty soon. And soon was a few days ago. There’s really nothing to it. I just cooked 4 veggie dogs on the George Foreman, sliced them and tossed them in a standard cornbread recipe. I think I used the one in Veganomicon. Next time, I think I’ll try it with seitan sausages for a more grown-up flavor. But I bet kids would go nuts over this. And what better to go with it than roasted sweet potatoes and a big pile o’ collards!

Fake Samosas

The March issue of Real Simple had a cool quickie recipe for samosas in it that involved using pre-made pie crust dough and convenience mashed potatoes you can buy in the refrigerator section. Side note: is it really that freakin’ hard to make mashed potatoes? I mean, come on, boil, mash, eat. Anyway, I thought I’d give that a try using sweet potatoes instead of white ones. Of course all the pre-made pie crust dough at the regular grocery store was all larded up. So I just used puff pastry. I knew the texture wouldn’t be the same or anything close to authentic, but what the hell, I also knew it would be good. When is puff pastry NOT good? Plus I had a jar of mango chutney sitting around that I picked up from Taj Mahal when I was there with Leigh.

Anyway, here’s the recipe with my changes.

Quickie Sweet Potato Samosas

* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 med. onion, chopped
* ¾ teaspoon salt
* ½ teaspoon pepper
* ½ teaspoon ground red pepper
* 1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
* 2 cups mashed cooked sweet potatoes
* 10 ounces frozen peas, thawed
* 1 package puff pastry, thawed
* 1 jar mango chutney

Heat oven to 375 degrees F.





Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and golden brown, about 8 minutes.





Add salt, pepper, ground red pepper and curry powder and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in the sweet potatoes and peas.





Unfold the puff pastry dough and cut each piece into 6 triangles. Place a heaping tablespoon of the potato mixture in the center of each piece. Gather the corners of the dough and pinch to form a point. Pinch the seams to seal. Transfer to a baking sheet.





Bake the samosas until golden, about 25 minutes. Serve with mango chutney. And now for the pics. The innards:

sweet potato samosas innards

Ready to be baked:

sweet potato samosas ready for baking

All puffy and golden:sweet potato samosas all baked