Wild Rice, Sweet Potato & Fig Dish

I am in the final week of my Master Cleanse and I am itching to cook something - anything!! It really must be a passion for me - because I just want to play around with tastes, textures and flavours to see what I come up with.

Today I decided to make a little meal for my daughter using just the things I had on hand - a large sweet potato, some wild rice mix (she was asking for rice) and figs. This combination of foods is rich and hearty as well as complementary to each other.

I started out baking the sweet potato in the oven while I cooked a small portion of wild rice in a saucepan. Then I chopped a shallot and some cloves of garlic. These I stir-fried in a little olive oil. Once the rice was cooking away I added some turmeric - mostly because I just love the smell and I think it always adds a nice touch to food.

Wild rice mix is really nice to make and not something I make all that often - I usually reserve this rice for special occasions. Of course the recipe I was working on today is a special side dish I want to serve with either turkey or duck over the holidays. 

Once the sweet potato was tender - I took it out of the oven and let it cool for a little while before peeling it and cutting into different sized pieces. I did the same with the figs - loosely chopped them to smaller bite sized bits.

Next, the rice was ready. I wanted to let things cool slightly so as not to be mushy when combined - so the rice was set aside while the shallot and garlic sautéd. 

Once everything was sitting cooling and ready - using a large enough deep bowl I gently added each ingredient - then a little salt and pepper as I folded this mixture over a few times to lightly mix it and to allow the flavours to combine.

It looks and smells lovely - and is great on the side with some fish or fowl or even on it's own with a feta cheese topping. 

April

Wild Rice, sweet potato and figs

Sweet Potato Samosa's

There are a few recipes I have been wanting to make but have been putting them off mostly because I have never made them before and need to have some space to 'create'. Getting the kitchen to myself doesn't happen very often, so these experiments do tend to be put off indefinitely.

Today however, I decided to throw caution to the wind and to get the kids to join in with me as I figured out a recipe for sweet potato samosa's. Once again this is not a food I would have been very familiar with, as I don't eat out or order take away, but, I was fairly certain they appeared to be easy enough to make.

I am still working on overcoming this level of resistance to some new recipe tastes and flavours - you know how we kind of get set in our ways with all our old standby's. Well, time to branch out!

So, the first thing on the agenda was to decide what I wanted to use as a filling for these samosa's - I wanted sweet potato and soft cooked vegetables. But I also wanted veg to be baked and not boiled, so as not to be too watery. Sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkin and shallots were chopped up, wrapped in foil and placed in the oven for an hour.

Roasted vegetables and stir fry mixed with spices

Next, to make this dish a little spicy I used an onion, a leek and garlic - chopped finely which was sautéd in a saucepan with a little oil. To this I added turmeric, cumin, salt and pepper. I didn't want to go overboard with spices because the children would not eat them.

Once the vegetables were done, I added the stir fry onion mixture in with that to make a lovely fragrant vegetable filling.

In the meantime I made a dough from 2 cups of spelt flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon bread soda. I added 6 tablespoons of milk and about the same of cold water until it looked like a slightly sticky dough and formed a ball.

Dough forms a ball 

This was then easy enough to roll out flat enough to make round cut outs. To make my samosa's I used 2 pieces of the dough for each one, placing the filling in the centre and pressing it together with a fork. 

Samosa dough ready for filling 

This was actually a very easy to make recipe, tasty and quite filling. The nicest part of this is the way the filling can be nearly anything - rice with vegetables, spicy mince lamb, feta cheese or any different combinations of these.

They were in the oven for about 23 minutes or so and then we got to have samosa's with our dinner. I used my homemade honey mustard sauce for dipping and it was delicious! 

Well, I hope to make another new dish again tomorrow... keep it new and exciting LOL

April

Samosa!