I've been on a recipe posting kick lately! I can attribute this to three things:
1. It's officially holiday season, which means all of the yummy homemade meals and sweets!
2. I'm enrolled in my first official "hands-on" cooking class in my culinary degree; it focuses on the basics of prepping and cooking, but it inspires me to cook more often. I actually picked this recipe for the "vegan" week in this class, and it was a hit!
3. I have a couple of posts that I'm working on that revolve around healing (for example, the follow-up to how I'm monitoring my guilt issue) and mental health, but I'm struggling with my words in that department because I'm actively dealing with some deep-rooted complications that decided to come to the surface. So my solution is to avoid that and post about food....not my healthiest move but I'm just taking things one day at a time!
There are tons of casserole recipes online and I did my research on quite a few so my consistency would be accurate; however, I did tweak the ingredients in order to bring a healthy twist to the familiar sweet potato casserole!
I wanted it to not only be vegan, but also be gluten-free and refined-sugar-free. Hopefully this means the dish is safe for the majority of people to eat!
Let's jump right in. And side note: If there is a style of eating that you follow that I haven't covered (or an allergy), let me know and I will do some research and modify a dish for you...or at least, I'll do my very best. I want this platform to be all-inclusive and I want to stand behind my belief that ANYBODY can enjoy delicious, wholesome food.
Ingredients for the filling:
-9 cups sweet potatoes peeled + chopped (about 4 lg potatoes)
-1 cup full fat coconut milk (from can)
-1 cup brown sugar
-1 tsp pure vanilla extract
-¾ tsp salt
-1 tsp cinnamon
-½ tsp nutmeg
Ingredients for crunchy butter topping:
-⅔ cup coconut sugar
-5 tablespoons (about 76 g) vegan butter softened to room temp. Or coconut oil, or Ghee (be careful because Ghee can have a saltier taste)
-½ cup almond flour *see notes below
-¼ tsp salt
-1 cup pecans
Directions
1) Add sweet potatoes to large pot filled with water. Bring to a boil. Cook for 10-15 min until they’re fork tender. Drain the water, then add potatoes back to pot.
2) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease casserole dish.
3) Add to pot: coconut milk, coconut sugar, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg. Mash/whisk until combined. Put mixture in casserole dish.
4) To make the topping: Stir and knead all of the ingredients for the topping (besides the pecans) with hands until slightly moist crumbs form. Now toss that with the pecans.
5) Evenly sprinkle/spread topping over the mixture.
6) Bake 35-45 minutes; until topping is slightly browned.
*Additional notes: I started with this amount of flour but I recall adding a bit more as I kneaded my mixture. The point is to get that flour and butter combined until the butter is not so moist; it will clump so you can "crumble" it over the top of your dish. Then the heat of the oven is going to make it crunchy!
*Somebody in my class did suggest making candied pecans, but for the sake of simplicity I didn't do this. That would be delicious though!
*You can obviously use all-purpose flour and regular brown sugar if you prefer.
I hope you enjoy recipe posts because one of my happy places is in the kitchen testing out recipes! I have a long way to go and so much to go but that's the beauty of cooking: it's an art that I can only get better at. And anyone can do it!
As I mentioned, I have more mental health posts coming soon; I think this time of year is extremely difficult for a lot of people and I want to bring attention to the underlying struggles that most of us (or at least, me) don't address.
I'll also be posting more holiday recipes and I would love to hear what you're planning on making!
Thank you for reading, thank you for your support, and thanks for being you.
*picture is my own