Thursday, July 10, 2008

Are you going to eat that?

Regular readers of my blog (bleeders??!) will know about my penchant for blogging about strange cooking experiments such as the 'Lasagna in a Dishwasher' or the 'Labor Day Cooking on the Dark Side'. Then there are times when I just blog generally about what I'm cooking or even the Spirituality of Recipes.

I intended this post to be just a general cooking entry, but now I'm not sure about whether it belongs in the terrifying category.

I pulled a recipe from Allrecipes.com because I wanted to make something different but healthy for dinner.

So here are some of the ingredients. 2 large sweet potatoes peeled and chopped and the turkey Italian Sausage. The rest I figure y'all can identify without me spelling it out for you.
Oops I forgot to add the salsa and the garlic to the ingredient pic, so here is a photo with them included plus a demonstration of my chopping skills.
Cook the sweet potato for about 10 minutes just to soften. While you do this remove the sausage meat from it's casings and brown it in a skillet. To be honest I always feel slightly dirty removing sausage from it's casing. It's such a weird feeling. I'm a 'twist the sausage in the middle and pull' kind of guy (having first slit the ends). There is something about the act of the twist that just makes my eyes water.
I'm using turkey Italian sausage in an attempt to make it low-fat, but look how much fat has still come out of the sausage!This is the kitchen towel after draining the fat. Look how much gunk could have been in my intestine!
Saute the onions, and bell peppers for a while and then add the mushrooms and the garlic. The more I cook I've discovered the less time I tend to saute my garlic. When I first started cooking I would almost caramelize it and often would accidentally get that acrid burnt taste. Now I practically just wave it in close proximity of the flame before serving.
Add the potatoes and the salsa and sprinkle in some cumin before letting it sit for 5 minutes to heat through and absorb the flavor.

It looked rather different to what I anticipated. The recipe said that all you need to serve it with is a green salad and you have a delicious meal. I didn't have a green salad, and it looked like I would need more than a limp lettuce leaf to consume this skillet.

Hooray for hard cider!!!!

It tasted interesting! When I was reflecting on it later, I realized that had I made this with normal potatoes instead of Sweet potatoes I would have ravenously consumed the entire skillet and viewed it as some kind of 'Breakfast Hash'. The trouble was those mounds of sweet potatoes.

I didn't eat sweet potatoes growing up - I can't even remember seeing one until I moved to Texas. I've never had one baked in foil, I've just eaten the occasional roasted one and have scarfed down many baskets of Sweet Potato fries (yumm!)

But there is something in the look of this dish that even though my brain said 'Potato' my spirit said 'Mushy carrot lumps'.

So was this a general cooking entry or a strange cooking experiment?

I have yet to decide....but if you want to weigh in with an opinion, I've got leftovers!

3 comments:

Lori Anderson said...

I didn't know one could eat sweet potatoes without brown sugar and butter. Interesting concept. Enjoy your weekend, Lori

Anonymous said...

Wish I had been there to share it with you. Mmmmmmm.

maria said...

Sounds fabulous. Another great thing to do with sweet potatoes is mash them with curry... yum and double yum.