Stuffed Baby Sweet Potatoes
This recipe is one of my all time favourites. In fact, it is SO good that I decided it had to feature on the cover of my last cookbook. The only problem was that, in the whirlwind that was self-publishing to my own arbitrarily tight schedule, I somehow forgot to include the actual recipe anywhere in the book. I had hundreds of copies printed and delivered in little cardboard boxes to my front door. I unpacked them, I flipped through them eagerly. I admired the front cover. I sighed with weary satisfaction. And then about three days later I realised that the recipe wasn’t there at all.
In much the same way that one determinedly avoids looking at recently acquired grey hairs, chipped mugs or paw prints on new couches, I spent the next year energetically ignoring the fact that I had omitted my favourite recipe from my own cookbook (and hoping no one else noticed what I’d done).
I ignored my omission to such a degree that I forgot entirely where I had written the recipe. Two years passed. I searched - fruitlessly - through all my scribbled cookbook journals, but I never found it. I decided it was lost to the ether and I gave up hope that it would ever find its way into one of my cookbooks...Until about a fortnight before publishing my latest cookbook, when - somehow, unbelievably - I opened one of my beaten up cooking journals (which I had already searched several times before) to the exact page where the recipe was scrawled!
At long last the universe of roasted almonds, fragrant dill and sugary sweet potatoes had smiled upon me!
And now here it is.
And all I can say to you is: you’d better bloody well go and cook it!
Stuffed Baby Sweet Potatoes
Serves 3 to 4
Ingredients
8-10 baby sweet potatoes (about 1 kg)
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
1⁄2 cup almonds
1 red onion, finely diced
1 large red chilli, thinly sliced
1⁄2 cup fresh dill
Salt and cracked pepper (to serve)
For the whipped goat’s cheese
150g goat’s cheese
2 Tbsp natural yoghurt
1⁄2 tsp olive oil
1⁄2 tsp lemon juice
1 clove garlic, finely diced
Method
Preheat your oven to 200 ̊C conventional (180 ̊C fan forced).
Toss the sweet potatoes with 2 Tbsp olive oil and 1 tsp salt, place on a baking tray and roast for 1 hour and 15 minutes (if your sweet potatoes are larger you may need to roast them a little longer - you want them to be incredibly soft (almost fudgy) and caramelised)
Pop the almonds on a separate tray and roast for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and roughly chop.
Put the diced red onion and the remaining 1 Tbsp olive oil in a small bowl. Stir to combine, then set aside. Whisk together the ingredients for the whipped goat’s cheese until very smooth.
To serve, slice each cooked sweet potato in half down the centre, fill with a dollop of the whipped goat’s cheese, a spoonful of the onion, a handful of the roasted almonds, some fresh dill, chopped chillies and salt and cracked pepper to taste.