Tag Archive for sweet potatoes

Pumpkin and Sweet Potato Soup


On Halloween night two of my friends carved pumpkins and saved me the meat. I made a yummy pumpkin bread and this soup. While the slow cooker is going your house is going to smell like fall.

Ingredients
Pumpkin meat from one pumpkin (about 4-6 cups on average)
3-4 medium sweet potatoes cut into 1 inch chunks
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
Enough water to cover your ingredients
1.5-2 cups of milk

Directions

1) Combine pumpkin, sweet potatoes, cloves, cinnamon, salt, and water in the slow cooker. Cook 10 hours on the low setting.
2) Add milk (cook 30 minutes more or go straight to step three)
3) Puree in the blender, serve and enjoy

 

Sweet Potato Dumplings

Or as I like to call them sweet potato dumplin’s. This is a recipe that I found in the fabulous Martha Hall Foose’s Screen Doors and Sweet Tea. I love this cookbook because it reads more like a novel then a cookbook. Martha is a Mississippi native that studied fine cooking in France, but came back to Mississippi to cook. She tells all about the characters her recipes come from with love and flair. I have sat and enjoyed just reading her cookbook as much as I enjoy reading Harper Lee.

I’m not going to post the recipe here for copyright reasons, but I urge you instead to purchase her cookbook. It’s worth more than the $10 I paid for it for sure.

Anyway, these sweet potato dumplings in her book got the best of me. Try as we might, Dave and I could not figure out how we were suppose to make them. Try for the life of us we could not figure out what “Form the dough into a ball. Cut it into four equal wedges. Working from one wedge at a time, roll the dough into four ropes about 3/4 inch in diameter. Cut each rope into 3/4 inch long segments. Roll each segment across the tines of a fork, pressing down slightly to form a depression in the middle with your fingerprint.” Of all the recipes not to have a picture in her book!

You might think we are idiots that we could not figure this out, but we couldn’t. I tried by myself several times. I called him for help. He gave instructions, watched me work on our 2 foot in diameter table, very puzzled as well. We eventually rolled out the dough, cut it in half to freeze half of it and attempted our best to make ropes out of the other dough. We did not do Martha Hall Foose proud, I can tell you that for free.

Maybe that’s because neither of us have ever made dumplings before. Maybe you have to be with a grandmother the first time you make dumplings, or maybe you have to be a grandmother to make dumplings.

Regardless, our dumplings ended up looking like this:

The dumplings were still tasty though, so we’re not upset by any means of the shape.

Sweet Potato Chili

Sweet Potato Chili

Ingredients:

* 3 good size sweet potatoes

* 1 can pinto beans

* 2 tbsp oil

* 1 yellow onion, diced

* 1 green bell pepper, diced

* 4 cloves garlic, diced

* 1/2 cup organic ketchup

* 1/3 cup molasses

* 3 tbsp Worchestershire sauce

* 2 tsp chili powder

* 1 tsp ground cumin

* 1 tsp Tabasco

* salt and pepper to taste (I usually add 1/2 tsp each)

* Depending on who is joining me I’ll had some of my Granny’s canned jalapeno peppers, diced.

Directions:

Dice the sweet potatoes and boil them in water until tender (about 20 minutes, discard water and set aside).

Saute` the onion, bell pepper, and garlic until tender (about 7 minutes).

Add all remaining ingredients except the sweet potatoes and beans. Cook 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add beans and sweet potatoes, reduce heat and cook 15 minutes. Serve hot with the Savory Molasses Cornbread

Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup

Ingredients:

1 pound of carrots, cut into 1 inch chunks
3-4 medium sized sweet potatoes cut into 1 inch chunks
2 tablespoons of fresh grated ginger
4 tablespoons of Nutiva’s Coconut Manna or Tropical Traditions’ Coconut Cream Concentrate. 
1 box of Chicken Stock, plus enough water to cover the rest of the ingredients
1 teaspoon of salt
1.5-2 cups of milk

Directions

1) Combine everything together except the milk. Let it cook on low for 8-10 hours or u until tender.
2) Add the milk (you can choose to cook for thirty minutes more or just add the milk and go straight to the next step).
3) Blend the ingredients
4) Serve, you may choose to top with coconut flakes if you wish.