Sweet Potato Salad Recipe With Almonds

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight were gonna make a salad with some curry flavored sweet potatoes and almonds.

Now I tried not to do too many salad in this show because they’re pretty simple and it takes a little bit to make a super duper special salad that no one has ever done before but I also feel that salads are very important part of your daily routine and so I want to encourage you to make more salad.

So adding some sweet potato or I’ve done some other salads with cooked banes, other cooked vegetables; great way to make a salad more exciting, more filling and make a whole meal out of it.

So with that were going to start with some sweet potato and I’ve put in the recipe to use two sweet potatoes but a lot of the time they’re this size, that’s a large sweet potato. You only need one of those.

Ok, this recipe is for two people so when I put quantities you know – use your judgment. If you don’t want to eat more than that much sweet potato in a sitting which I love sweet potato but I don’t think I can handle that much, just stick with one.

Ok, I’ve got a pot of water here that I’m going to bring up to a high to a boil. Just put a little bit of salt in there, that’s not for the water. It’s to help the sweet potato cook. If I put it right now, the salt will dissolve.

Ok. You need to peel and cube your sweet potato. What I like to do is just chopped off the end and I use a little bucket to collect my peelings so that I don’t have to bring the compost bucket in the house coz it kinda stinks. So just peel it on into there.

So, I’ve got my sweet potato cut into cubes at this point, the smaller you cut them the faster they will cook and I am boiling my sweet potato because it’s a very quick way to cook them but a very delicious way to cook a sweet potato is to bake it.

Just like you would bake potato, just pop it on the oven. It does take quite awhile because sweet potatoes tend to be large but it is very delicious. It brings out the natural sugars of the sweet potatoes as supposed to boiling which just cooks the sweet potato.

Some interesting thing to know about sweet potato if you compare them to regular potatoes, one is that they’re glycemic index is much lower and the glycemic index is a measure of how quickly and how much a food changes your blood sugar levels so potatoes tend to make your blood sugar go like this. Sweet potatoes are a little bit lower.

They also have a lot more flavor to them naturally which is why I love them but it means that if you’re the kind of person that likes to load sour cream, and green onions and all these kind of stuff and bake and bits on your potatoes that if your trying to go for a healthy vegan diet sweet potatoes are really turn on because they have a lot natural flavors, you don’t need to add that stuff to them to make them really delicious.

The other thing is that if you look at this they are orange and when a food has a color to it, it means that there are particular nutrients making that color and orange and yellow vegetables are all high in beta-carotene which is vitamin A and so that’s you usually hear carrots that have that.

But any orange or yellow vegetables has beta-carotene and also there are some other – they call them phytonutrients and they are very plentiful in the orange and yellow vegetables.

So always get to get some colourful vegetables in your life and also very flavorful. So as this water come up to a boil you can just pop those in and sweet potatoes like I said will take different amount of time base on how big you cut them but usually about fifteen minutes.

Now, the salt as I mention is not for the water to speed up the boil, the best way to get the water boiling faster is to put a lid on your pot.

Alright, here are our sweet potatoes fully cooked. You can tell if you put a knife or fork in them that they’re gonna be nice and soft and all I do to drain them is just hold the lid over, tip it over into the sink.

What I’m gonna do here is actually add the spices directly onto the sweet potatoes, so I’ve got some coriander here. And then some cumin and what I always say is that I don’t actually literally measure the spices when I put them on my food but what you want to do is ( a big chunk came out there) is go with your own taste.

So, if you don’t like a lot of cayenne pepper for instance, like I don’t. I like things with a little bit of spice but just a pinch. Cayenne is quite powerful so I don’t put very much on but if you like spices go for it.

Black pepper and what I’m also going to add in here are some green onions that I’ve chopped as well as some almonds and what I do with almonds is take the whole almonds and toast it a little bit in my toaster oven and then I just roughly chopped them up.

Nuts do not need a lot of time on the heat so just be really careful if you’re toasting them. Once you can smell the nut it needs to come out right away coz after that it will burn pretty quickly.

So once you get everything, the spices, the onion and the almonds in here just give it a gentle stir, the sweet potatoes will be pretty soft so you don’t want to mush them up really. Just get the spices around all of them.

And then I have a bowl of lettuce here, really simple salad dressing if you haven’t nice topping that your putting in your salad like this sweet potato almonds with really good flavors you can do something really simple with your salad.

Just take a little bit of olive oil and just give it a little sprinkle and then some lemon juice and you can use fresh lemon if you like. I just don’t happen to have any so I’m using some lemon juice.

And just a little sprinkle on there, give it a little toss, get a nice big bunch of those green on your plates and then top it off with some sweet potatoes.

And you don’t have to use all of these sweet potatoes on your salad. They’d make great leftovers to take for lunch or eat it on the next day, whatever you like.

You can find the recipe for our curry sweet potato salad at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.