Sweet Potato Soup Bread & Buddha
A good friend shared some home spun wisdom recently. After dinner time clean up, she
declares “kitchen closed”. Any requirements for sustenance after that are self administered and limited to fresh fruit, cheese sticks and water.
Despite the repetitive task of fixing dinner everyday, my kitchen, the heart of my home, opens early in the morning with a French press filled with freshly brewed Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend® coffee, after which anything seems possible. At the other end of the day, it’s easy to feel jaded, so I appreciate the “kitchen closed” notion.
Our small business ensures that ingredients and recipes are never far from my mind, and I admit to occasionally having the culinary equivalent of writer’s block. We love to partner with other like minded, experienced bloggers and cook book authors to adapt recipes for our slow cooker. On her blog, The Bread and Buddha, Pam Gross shares how she transformed her former kitchen angst, (from the cook – eat – repeat cycle and cooking for friends), into a philosophy based on her mantra “to make healthy food taste good”.
Pam’s recipe for Spicy Sweet Potato Soup gave her the sensation “that I have arrived – like “Hey, look at me…I CAN really cook.” And it made her super proud. I concur.
This soup is a satisfying meal made from good ingredients, married together with fragrant curry flavors. Make ahead and freeze. Serve hot or chilled with yoghurt.
Add texture with a side of crispy kale chips. Separate the leaf from the stem of the kale and discard the stem. Spray the leaf with olive oil and lay on a tray in the oven at 400 degrees C for 6 – 8 minutes.
Pam denotes this as a HEARTFUL RECIPE – One of our real food recipes that focuses on veggies, protein, healthy fats and/or healthy carbs and doesn’t include gluten, dairy, soy, refined sugar, corn or peanuts.
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1 1/2 cups / 1 medium onion chopped
- 1 medium leek, chopped
- 1 tsp / 2 cloves garlic minced
- 1 1/2 tbsp Madras curry powder or Indian Dal Blend *
- 4 cups / 2 large sweet potatoes, washed, peeled and chopped into small cubes
- 1 cup peas (can be frozen)
- 1 x 14oz can lite coconut milk
- 4 cups chicken broth (more for a thinner consistency)
- 1 1/2 tbsp coconut sugar (optional)
- 1 1/2 tbsp lime juice
- 2 handfuls of baby spinach
- 2 pinches (or 1/8 tsp) red pepper flakes
- salt to taste
- heat the oil in a skillet and soften the onion, garlic and leek
- transfer the onions mixture to the slow cooker
- stir in the curry powder, sweet potatoes, peas, coconut milk, broth, sugar and lime juice
- cover and cook on LOW for 6 hours
- once cooked, stir in the spinach and use an immersion blender to purée the soup
- serve with the pepper flakes and an extra squeeze of lime juice
- I made this recipe without the coconut sugar and found it to be sufficiently sweet for my tastes.
- stir in 1 1/2 tbsp of fish sauce along with the lime juice for an extra Thai flavor.
Zen Moment
“To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”
― Buddha
