Food Friday

I absolutely love cooking and baking (especially baking!) and lately one thing I'm trying to do is cook one new item for dinner every week. My goal  is to find some recipes that I will use regularly and that have some healthier ingredients. "Food Friday" is a blog topic I'd like to continue every week so that I can share my weekly recipe choice with you. Now, I love exercising and being healthy (as I'm sure you assumed after reading the title of my blog), but I'm no nutritionist and definitely love to eat! These will just be some recipes that I made for dinner, that I enjoyed and that I think will help incorporate more of a variety of foods into my own diet. I hope that if you decide to make them that you enjoy them, too!

This week I made a couple of recipes, but the one that really stood out to me was the Maple Ginger Sweet Potatoes with Apples, created by Mary Gardner of Cedar Springs, Illinois. I found this recipe card in a basket of free recipes at one of my local apple orchards. It stood out to me right away and, after many weeks of holding onto it, I've finally made it. It's delicious!

Maple Ginger Sweet Potatoes with Apples

1-1/2 lbs. sweet potatoes, peeled & cut into bite-sized pieces (about 5 cups)

2 medium tart Michigan Apples*, chopped (2 cups)

1/4 cup dried cranberries

1-1/2 tsp. grated fresh ginger

1/2 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. pepper

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup maple syrup or maple-flavor syrup

*suggested varieties: McIntosh, Paula Red or Rome

In a slow cooker, combine all but water and syrup. Mix the syrup with the water and pour over everything in the cooker. Cover and cook on low setting for 3-4 hours or on high for 1-1/2 hours. 

Conventional oven: Cover and bake at 325 degrees

This would be the place to admit that I sometimes change up the recipe a little bit to fit it to what ingredients I have at that particular moment :). The only changes I've made, with this one, however, are I used around 4 cups of sweet potatoes instead of 5 cups and I omitted the salt (I often choose not to put it in... in general, I feel like there's a lot of salt in many foods these days, so I leave it out if I feel it won't mess up the recipe at all). I used McIntosh apples and maple flavored syrup (there usually isn't maple syrup in the house and ironically enough I had bought the maple flavored, which I normally don't do, so it worked out well!). I don't have a slow cooker so I chose to use the oven. Since there wasn't a bake time listed for when using a conventional oven I chose to go with 1-1/2 hours, and actually ended up taking it out around 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes. A good ol' fashioned glass casserole dish worked very well for me and I used aluminium foil as a cover.

For anyone who is a apple and/or sweet potato fan like me I HIGHLY recommend this recipe! It's an absolutely fantastic warm side dish to come inside to after being out in this cold and drafty autumn days. 

Alrighty, off I go to pack for my mini vacation this weekend. I'm hoping Mother Nature will cooperate and the weekend weather forecast will be worthy of running in! (Maybe we'll even get a little sunshine :) *fingers crossed*....)

Bon Apétit!