Get Your Beta-Carotene Here!

Holy Moley Roley Poley! I’ve discovered a soup that I love better than tomato basil. Better than chicken noodle. A bold claim, I know.

I had been seeing carrot soup crop up everywhere. In one day, I noticed a recipe in my google reader, a recipe on Joy’s website AND a recipe on Guy’s Big Bite. I took it as a sign.

My what a delicious sign it was.

Taking a little something from each recipe I saw, I used the recipe instructions from Joy the Baker. I made the soup the night before I planned on serving it to the suspecting Kyle. This way the soup had a chance to cool so I could blend it in batches in my shnazzy Bullet Blender. I also think that letting the soup sit overnight allowed the flavors to meld together even better.

This soup is great cold or piping hot. The perfect summer soup. Since Mother Nature has insisted on switching from Winter to Summer while skipping my friend Spring.

Is there anything better than bright orange soup?

I didn’t think so.

Carrot Ginger Soup (adapted from Joy the Baker)
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
1 vidalia onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
1 large red potato, peeled and chopped
4 cups sliced carrots
2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups water
pinch of nutmeg, salt and pepper
fresh cilantro and paprika for garnish

Heat oil in a large pan over medium. Add in onions and cook about 15 minutes or until they start to caramelize a bit. Add ginger, garlic and spices and cook for 3-5 minutes. Add in potato and carrots and cook for 5-10 minutes.

Turn up the heat to medium high and add the broth and water. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the carrots and potato are softened to your liking. Remove from the flame and allow to cool.

When the soup is cooled, puree in a blender and refrigerate overnight. The next day pour the soup into a large pot and heat over low heat, stirring constantly. Garnish with fresh cilantro and paprika.

Nom nom nom!

Un-awesome with a Side of Stardom!

You know what’s not so awesome?

When you burn your sweet potato fries.

*sob*

Don’t worry, I ate them anyway. No sweet potato goes to waste in THIS house.

See after watching Rachael Ray make oven fries during my lunch hour on Thursday, I got the brilliant idea to do the same thing for dinner! And to eat them with a nice, cold green/blue smoothie!

Well Rachael said to turn the heat up to 500 degrees and let those suckers go for about 25 minutes.

I probably should have kept a closer eye on them.

And added dates to my smoothie.

What was the star of the meal? The peanuty-lime dipping sauce.

Ooooooh yeeeeeeah..

Peanut-Lime Sauce
1 tablespoon stone ground mustard
1 tablespoon apple juice
juice of 1 lime
1 tablespoon peanut flour

Whisk all ingredients together and dip away! If you don’t have peanut flour, you could probably just substitute peanut butter. I didn’t have any peanut butter so I used my peanut flour!

Purple Potato Eater

I said Mr Purple Potato Eater, what’s your line?
He said eating purple potatoes, and it sure is fine
But that’s not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock ‘n roll band

Granted I changed the words around to fit my current purple passion, but I loved that song growing up! As many young girls do, I loved anything purple! It’s only fitting that I’d love purple potatoes, too!

I discovered the beauties one afternoon while browsing in Kroger. While I’d heard of them, I’d never been able to partake in their purple wonderment. Until now. I snatched up a couple of those bad boys and hauled my expensive tastes up to the register. The kind woman there rang them up as baking potatoes, saving me $3 a pound in the process! Bless her heart! I was filled with happiness!

The happiness only grew as I arrived home, chopped up a potato and roasted it to perfection. Maybe they don’t taste outrageously different, but they sure are gorgeous!

Roasted Purple Potato
1 purple potato, washed and chopped into large pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
Pinch of kosher salt
Pinch of black caraway seeds
Pinch of dried sage

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a cast iron skillet with aluminum foil. Toss all ingredients together in a bowl. Transfer potato mixture into skillet and bake 30 minutes or until done to your liking. Enjoy!

Sweet Potato Granola

I’d like to start off this post with a shout out to Kankakee Natural Foods. This is and has been my favorite store in the area since I discovered its existence about a year ago. Best unsweetened dehydrated banana chips this side of the Rockies. Well maybe. I don’t really know what the deal is with banana chips over there in California. Probably pretty substantial, though. Maybe if I go over there someday I’ll find out.

Anyway, so I’m standing at the checkout counter with my granola-making purchases when I suddenly acquired a taste for dried blueberries. I asked the girl behind the counter if they ever dried their own blueberries. She said they didn’t, but they did get in packages of them. She walked over and grabbed them off the shelf to show me. It saddened me that they were teensy bags.

Damn blueberries for being so tiny and delicious and not being grown in my area – therefore expensive!! I thanked her for showing me and proceeded to the door as she returned the blueberries to their shelf.

Then the clouds parted! She waved me down and walked toward me carrying several shiny, beautiful bags of dried blueberries. It turns out that they were a few months past their shelf date and they weren’t allowed to have them on the shelf anymore. She said they were mine if I wanted them and all I’d have to do is just throw them out if they weren’t any good.

I thanked her profusely, practically jumped up and down like a child going to Disney World! Free dried blueberries! Woo-hoo!!

I rushed home to make my granola!

This recipe is inspired by a recipe for Maple Pumpkin Granola I ran across on Sugar Plum. I already have a favorite granola recipe, but it’s not exactly the most figure friendly one. It has lots of peanut butter, butter, honey and chocolate… I have to save it for special occasions.

So here’s my granola recipe. And if by some chance there’s some ingredient you find appalling, just swap it out with something you like! This mixture seems to be pretty delicious completely unbaked or even partially baked. Filling and delicious in any form!

Sweet Potato Granola
1 cup steel cut oats
1/3 cup rye berries
1/3 cup raw pumpkin seeds
1 cup unsweetened banana chips
1/4 cup dried blueberries
1/8 cup flax seed
1/4 cup All Bran cereal
1/4 cup unsalted peanuts
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cooked
3 dried figs
1 tablespoon tahini paste
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter (substitute Earth Balance or more oil to make it vegan)
1 teaspoon mango extract
1/4 to 1/2 cup water
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a baking sheet with canola oil and set aside. In a bowl mix oats, rye berries, pumpkin seeds, banana chips, blueberries, flax seed, cereal and peanuts. In a food processor, puree sweet potato, figs, tahini, olive oil, butter, extract, water and salt. Combine oats mixture and sweet potato mixture. Spread onto the cookie sheet and bake for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring the ingredients up halfway through.

The Great Red Bean Experiment

I have finally done it! I’ve mashed the beans, made the dough, steamed the buns, and made.. RED BEAN CAKES! These are not your ordinary cakes. I put my own personal spin on them, of course. Quite some time ago I made sweet potato biscuits with sage gravy.. now let me tell you, making biscuits is HARD WORK! I haven’t made them since, but decided this was the right time to pull them out and use them for my experiment! I borrowed my dad’s bamboo steamer and went to work on creating!

Red Bean Stuffed Sweet Potato Biscuits
For the Red Bean Paste:
1 cup red adzuki beans
1/2 cup sugar

For the Biscuits:
3/4 cup cooked, mashed sweet potatoes
1 1/4 cups white rice flour
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons milk

Cook up the beans on the stove until they’re nice and soft, this will take roughly 2 hours and you will have to keep adding more water as they cook. Once all nice and soft, mash the beans up and add the sugar. Mash it some more until the sugar is all incorporated, then set aside.

Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. I cheated a bit on this next step. Since I cooked up the potatoes the same day, I just added the butter into the steaming mashed potatoes along with the oil and mixed them up that way. Add the potatoes (& Co) to the flour mixture and combine well. Add milk and mix until the mixture looks nice and doughy, like this!

Here comes the messy part.. this dough is rather sticky and requires quite a bit of flour to roll out. I regret that I did not take more photos of this, but I was alone and had messy fingers! I took about a third of the dough at a time and worked in some all purpose gluten free flour to make it suitable for rolling (in other words, so it wouldn’t stick to my makeshift rolling pin: the outside of my pushup measuring cup!) I rolled the dough out into about quarter inch or so thickness and cut them out using the same tool I rolled with, which turned out circles about two inches across. I then took roughly a spoonful of red bean paste, placed it in the center of one of my dough circles, covered it with another circle, and smoothed the edges closed so they were seamless. I repeated this process over and over again until I had very little paste and very little dough left. I mixed the two together and made two buns out of them.

I then left my little buns in the fridge for 3 hours while I ran out to visit my Grandma and play with my niece. When I came home, it was time to STEAM!! Since I don’t have a wok, I set up the bamboo steamer on my big red pot and added some lavender to the water for flavor. I set about four buns at a time in each basket (on top of some wax paper) and let them steam for about fifteen or so minutes.

Now, this is going to be hard, but try to let them cool before you remove them from the wax paper or they’ll fall apart! Once they’re off the paper.. it’s munching time!

Mmm soup.. I mean noodle soup.. I mean soup..

I love sweet potatoes. They’re naturally sweet, delicious, and best of all.. they’re ORANGE! After craving them for months on end, I finally purchased a few. I pondered what to do.. bake them straight, make a smoothie I found online.. then it dawned on me. Make a soup!! I threw some tastiness in a pot and let it simmer for a few hours and voila!

Warning: This soup is a tad on the spicy side, I think the next time I might reduce the amount of chipotle and throw in some diced chicken.

Sweet Potato Soup
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and chopped
1/2 onion thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 can butter beans, well rinsed
2 chipotle peppers, diced
2 tablespoons golden raisins
2 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup skim milk
1 cup corn
A pinch of lemon zest
Dash celery salt, pepper, and cinnamon, to taste

Combine all ingredients in slow cooker. Cook on high for an hour, then reduce to low and simmer until potatoes are done just the way you like them. You can puree the soup if you’d like a more consistent look, but I just left it alone. Enjoy!