Saturday, December 18, 2010

The Soup That Started It All: Spicy Sweet Potato



It's almost my one-year Midnight Poutine anniversary. I just remembered this the other day when I made this spicy sweet potato soup recipe. It was the first recipe I posted on the site and it's even been linked to from a site called Endless Simmer about the top 100 sweet potato recipes online. It's a pretty great recipe. Anyway, the person who gave me this beautiful cast-iron skillet was coming for lunch, and this is a great soup. Put two and two together.

The only change I made to the recipe was skipping the dried chilies part (the only time consuming, somewhat annoying part) and using my Indian pickle as the oil to sauté the onions, then adding the sliced jalapenos from the pickle later in the recipe. The heat would be more than enough. I didn't even have to add any more salt. So basically I could save 2 steps and and 45 minutes worth of soaking and chopping effort, a very important change when you got up at 5:45am that morning for radio.
It worked perfectly. I just drained a little oil from the pickle and went right on with the recipe. Then when I added the broth I also added the drained jalapenos - about 6 or so. You can add more a garnish to individual servings, but 6 ends up being a fair bit of heat. Hurray! The only other difference with this recipe is that I garnished with pumpkin seeds. Normally I'd toast them, but these were pre-soaked and dehydrated ("raw" food style), so toasting kinds of kills all those wonderful nutrients I was trying to save through my "raw" nut-soaking. So garnish as you wish.

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