Here and there

The next blog Stephanie and I will be posting is about foods that fight cancer. As much as I love these recipes that will be coming out, and I can’t wait to share them with you, they are missing two things. Purple things. Potatoes and carrots to be exact. They say you have to eat the rainbow, (and they don’t mean skittles, I promise) but purple foods are just a little bit better for you. Stephanie will get in to all that, but I looked and looked, and could not find purple carrots or potatoes when I was doing the recipes. I am growing carrots and figured they were not in season yet bc mine haven’t matured. I kid you not, the day after I gave her my recipes for nutritional analysis, I found both purple carrots, and potatoes.

This is a pork tenderloin with a pesto that I’ll be posting soon and the carrots are washed well with the skin left on, I sliced them and sautéed them for a min before adding a little water, honey, cayenne and salt.

The purple potatoes are much easier to find. Unless you are looking.

I diced some garlic, and tossed the washed potatoes in the garlic and olive oil. Oh and salt always salt.
Then I roasted them in a 400 degree oven until they were fork tender. These guys are about the size of a large cherry tomato, so they will not take that long.

Now y’all know me, and you know I like to reinvent left overs, so the next day, you can take these taters, heat them up, and mash them with a little olive oil and you’ve got a totally new side dish the next day.

I love mashed potatoes. Like really love them, however I have two big problems as a lazy person.

1) you have to peel them first. And I hate peeling potatoes.
2) you have to boil them. That creates dishes to wash later, plus, any time you cook a vegetable in water like that, you are losing ALL the nutrition to the water. If you want to be healthier, so you eat more veggies, but you are boiling said veggies, you might as well eat air. It’s about the same nutritionally. Or you can drink the liquid that you have cooked in. You can get back the nutrition that way.

Recently, a friend of mine and her whole family came down with a stomach bug. Knowing how miserable that can be with NO ONE healthy enough to help out I decided to make them a big bowl of mashed sweet taters. When I’m sick, I crave salty mashed potatoes, and I figured they needed the vitamins in the sweet potatoes, plus I could add ginger and black strap molasses to help their stomachs. This is not a new recipe, it’s basically this recipe I just added a little more ginger. But I changed one big part of the process.
I baked the potatoes. Whole. Just threw them in a 400 degree oven until they were fork tender.

Not only did the meat cook, but the skins pulled away from the meat and pulled right off!

Yes, this takes a little longer, but what would you rather do? Spend your time peeling and chopping then washing extra dishes? Or not doing that at all? Plus all that tatery nutrition stays right there in the tater where you can eat it!

Give it a try and let me know what you think!