Love this idea I adapted from a recipe in Fine Cooking magazine. You may remember a decade or more of pre-dinner nibbles served in endive leaves . In many years worth of variations, I don’t ever remember seeing one with sweet potatoes – but what a great combination of creamy, sweet sweet potatoes with the slightly bitter endive leaves.
This recipe came from Fine Cooking magazine about a decade ago. You can whip up the mayonnaise any time and use it for all kinds of purposes. The recipe looks like it has a lot of ingredients, but adapt it to what’s in the pantry. Do you still have a few jalapenos hanging around? Perfect. No red pepper, leave it out. Cook the eggs anyway you like, although fried eggs would be traditional.
This idea for sweet potatoes comes from closer to home. Lisa Rochon is a New Orleans-born chef and caterer who has a booth at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market. This recipe is one she demonstrated in November as an alternative to the traditional “sweet” sweet potato side dish. Lisa sells her fine herbes mixture at the market. You can find similar mixes at the store, or you can substitute something else. Fine herbes are traditionally a mixture of parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon.
Finally, this is a recipe we ran in the AJC last year in a story about sweet potatoes. It will work perfectly well with just butternut squash – and it really is good.
This dish is pretty irresistible even for those who expect their sweet potatoes to be sweet. A little honey tips the scale slightly to the sweet side, but the natural sweetness of the butternut squash and sweet potatoes may be all you need.
These savory roasted vegetables combined with crisp arugula could be served as a salad-like first course, or as a side dish with the main meal. And it’s easy to halve or double the recipe, depending on the number of people you’re serving.
To make ahead of time, roast the sweet potatoes and squash a few hours or a day ahead and refrigerate up to 1 day. Heat roasted vegetables in a microwave in 2- to 3-minute intervals until just warmed through, then combine with arugula and dress with balsamic vinegar and olive oil just before serving.
Make your own sweet potato puree by baking a sweet potato and then pureeing in a processor until completely smooth. This is one of those recipes where the puree substitutes for much of the fat. With the whole-wheat flour, it’s almost healthy! Adapted from a recipe in Whole Living magazine.
Finally I offer this recipe for an African-inspired stew. It was wonderful, even better the next day as most stews are. I still have a few hot peppers which are basically just drying out in the refrigerator, so I used them in place of the serranos this recipe calls for. The cabbage was the quarter head still in the vegetable crisper. No butternut squash still in your pantry? Just add more rutabagas or sweet potatoes. And maybe you’re one of those brilliant souls who took Suzanne’s suggestion and canned your own tomatoes this summer when they were in such abundance. The perfect accompaniment? MB cornbread or corn muffins.
Adapted from a recipe in “The Cornbread Gospels” by Crescent Dragonwagon (Workman, $14.95).
The folks at Moore Farms and Friends offer an alternative to the traditional CSA and in their weekly e-newsletter, they included this recipe. I thought it was a great explanation of how interesting recipes and dishes get developed. Enjoy it with any of the roots in today’s box. This is copied straight from Laurie’s email.