Baked Sweet Potato Recipe With Pinto Beans

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a baked dish with some sweet potatoes, some zucchini and some pinto beans.

Now before we get started makes sure your pinto beans are cooked or if you’re using canned that you’ve drained and rinse them off. So these ones are canned today and pinto beans are a medium sized bean, they’re a little bit pinkish in colour and they’re nice and soft.

So these ones, they can use some soaking if you’re using dried and then cooked them with no salt, a little bit of combo if you wanna helped digestion, that’s seaweed and if you are using canned makes sure you get a canned that doesn’t have any salt in the ingredients.

If you add salt while the beans are cooking they’re gonna be tough, they’re not gonna be nice and soft, not what you are looking for. So, these guys I used canned sometimes because I’ve had a variety of canned beans that - that don’t use any salt and they cooked with combo, so perfect!

Alright! Once those are cooked, then you can move on to your sweet potatoes and I always use the orange variety though the white or the orange both fine. They’re actually both sweet potatoes even though these orange ones are labelled yams and all you gotta do is peel them. I like to cut off the ends before I start peeling and I peel directly into my little compost container and then what I do is take this container out to compost, very simple.

So, peel off your sweet potatoes and we’re gonna go to the rest of our veggies. Here are my lovely sweet potatoes, all cut up and I like to do them in a fairly small cut because they’re gonna cooked a little bit faster the smaller you cut them, so there we go. Next, I’m moving on to zucchini.

And vegetables like zucchini are excellent to add to any kind of dish when they’re green, watery vegetables like zucchini, they’re going to bring a lot of enzymes and nutrients to your dish and they helped in the digestion of the other components of your meal.

So, in this case sweet potatoes and beans are sometimes a little bit more difficult to digest. They’re very dense in nutrients and calories so zucchini helped to lighten up the dish and brings some enzymes to help indigestion.

Things are getting a little bit tight in my baking dish here but the last step I’m gonna do is just juice a little bit of olive oil on to these vegetables because we’re cutting them up before we put them in the oven they need some oil to help protect them.

Even though I’m covering this dish, it’s just a little bit, it’s not a whole lot, get those back in there. The best way to mix up your vegetables with oil is to use your hand because it’s going to minimize the amount of oil that you need and also you can grabbed back any vegetables that tries to flee the dish.

They try to save themselves!

We’ll turn the oven on to some around 350F, not too crucial what exact temperature you got here but 350F is pretty good. Ok! Now that we’ve got the oil mix on there, I’m also going to crack some salt. Salt helps the cooking process; it draws the moisture out of the vegetables so that it actually softens.

So salt is important for this, there is no substitute for that purpose but you don’t need to use a lot of salt. Now the main issue with salt is when it comes in through processed foods and I lost a zucchini in the floor, it happens sometimes.

Anyway, salt is an issue when it comes in processed foods because its way overuse in process foods but if you cut those out of your diet, it’s significant amount of salt that’s gonna be cut out and you don’t need to worry too much about putting salt in your food unless you’ve been order on a strict no sodium diet because of health reason but even then I tend to think that if your cutting back on the processed food, if you cut them out entirely you’ve very little sodium in your diet.

Ok! so, got that going, what I’m gonna do is crack a little bit of black pepper on here just for some flavour, gonna add a little bit of cayenne to spice things up a little and I’m just gonna sprinkle them on top, I’ll stir it around halfway through so that this coats all the vegetables.

I’m also going to add a little bit of apple cider for a little touch of sweetness and that will help carry the cayenne pepper through the dish as well and helps soften that cayenne.

These beans, see I feel like that they’re not gonna fit until the zucchini has a little bit of a chance to soften so I’m gonna leave that for now, I have a bigger dish, go ahead and throw them in, they don’t mind.

So, put a lid on these, you don’t need to wait for the oven to preheat, vegetables don’t really mind. Pop them in and the sweet potatoes takes longer to cook so I cut the sweet potatoes actually to a smaller cube than the zuchinni. The zucchini chunks are a little bit bigger coz they take less time to cook but were gonna leave that in for about half an hour.

I’ll give it a check at fifteen minutes, stir it around, add these beans coz they’re gonna be ruined by then and then make sure nothing is drying out.

It's better in fifteen minutes and you can see that things have cooked a little bit, starting to shrink down and I’ve got enough room, I think, I hoped for these beans.

So, I’ll just stir them through, get the flavours coated around these beans and then put the lid back on, pop it back in the oven for about 15 minutes. So, it’s been about half an hour now and the sweet potatoes are looking nice and soft. So, I’m gonna turned the oven off and this is ready to go.

There you go! Phil and I are going to have this with just a simple green salad.

I hoped you enjoyed it. You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipe.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.