Pan Roasted Carrots & Sweet Potatoes

Here’s an easy one. Mom and I decided to make a special dinner the other night, but the kitchen we were using didn’t have much in the way of baking dishes. So, we got out the biggest pot we could find…

for these sweet potatoes and carrots. Mom prefers the carrots left whole because they are so lovely. So all I had to do was wash and chop the sweet potatoes!

Melted a couple big spoonfuls of coconut oil over medium heat, and added half a dozen or so slightly crushed cloves of garlic. Heat the garlic in the oil for a few minutes, stirring regularly to keep them from browning much.

Then add the veggies – carrots first, then potatoes. I only seasoned them with salt and pepper. Vegetables are done when they’re fork tender and browned on all sides.

Served with wild rice & chestnuts, that recipe’s coming next!

sweet potato oatmeal

My dad makes the sweet potatoes every year for Thanksgiving. Or I don’t know, maybe they’re really yams. But we always call them sweet potatoes. Anyway. He has a really simple recipe. He uses the canned potatoes in syrup, I think he drains them, then puts them in a baking dish with margarine, brown sugar, cinnamon, pineapple chunks, mandarin oranges and the juice/syrup from both fruits. Then he bakes it until the syrups, sugar, and margarine make a really thick, heavy, delicious, buttery sauce.

Since I was with my mom’s family for Thanksgiving this year, he saved some of the sweet potatoes for me. I wanted to make a meal of them, so I did this…

Mashed them a bit and put them in a small saucepan.

Added 1/2 C oatmeal, ground into flour.

Stirred the flour in until the mixture was nice and thick,

add 1 C milk substitute (I used plain unsweetened almond milk).

Stir it up. Heat until just boiling, let it cook at that temp for a minute or two.Lower the heat. Carefully taste it to see if you need to add more cinnamon or anything, then let it cook another minute or two. If it gets too thick while it’s cooking, you can always add more liquid.

I garnished mine with some of the extra mandarin oranges and pineapple, and a sprinkling of cinnamon. I just love a good breakfast.

CSA dinner: roasted fall veggies with tahini sauce & gluten free bread

I didn’t getting around to posting this last week, but I had dinner at Amanda’s last Monday night. She had an abundance of CSA veggies (again!) and this time she made a wonderful fall vegetable roast.

Let’s see if I can remember what was in here…sweet potatoes, squash, mushrooms, roasted garlic, raw apples and walnuts, and dried cranberries (or cherries? I can’t remember, sorry) on a bed of greens.

She also made gluten free bread that was kind of an experiment. She couldn’t decide if she liked it or not, but we both just kept picking at it and ate a ton while we were talking. So much so we were too full for the snacks I brought along!

All I had to do was provide the dressing. In this old Frank’s Red Hot Sauce bottle is a small batch of tahini sauce made with about 2 Tbsp tahini, a pinch of salt, and maple syrup and cinnamon to taste. Thin it down with water. It was too thick to shake through the tiny spout, but we just took the cap off and poured the dressing on.

It’s a small miracle it paired well with the savory flavors in Amanda’s roast because I had no idea how she was planning to season it :) I’m sure we would’ve eaten the whole platter if we had a couple more hours to hangout.