Soupalooza: Coconut milk, spinach add sweetness to sweet potato stew
OK, so I've hopped on the avocado toast wagon. What's not to love? I love avocados and I love toast, but it never occurred to me to pair the two until I stumbled on this "new" food trend while trolling the Internet looking for a good fall soup recipe. It appears there are about 101 ways to make avocado toast - with eggs, with tomatoes, with bacon, with all three, you name it - but that's for another day and another column. (Just Google it and you'll see what I mean).
While wandering around the Internet, I also found a website that has fast become my new foodie favorite: food52.com. It's filled with recipes, tips and ideas from home cooks, sort of a crowdsourced recipe collective. The tagline is "Helping people become better, smarter, happier cooks" and I couldn't agree more.
The site founded by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, both cooks and writers with great credentials including working together on The New York Times cookbook. They wanted to publish a cookbook of recipes submitted online by home cooks. What they wound up with is a wonderful, dedicated group of home cooks, much like our very own Cook of the Week community.
Each week, they introduce two themes and readers have five days to submit original recipes. Two finalists in each category are selected and readers then vote for the winner. Recent challenges included best sandwich recipes and best dinner that makes a good lunch. The result is a website filled with really creative, home-tested recipes - including dozens of soup recipes - and videos.
I found this one for Roasted Sweet Potato Coconut Stew, perfect for this time of year. I'm not exactly sure why it's called stew because my version definitely turned out more soup, than stew. At the table I added a fairly large dose of hot sauce to temper the sweetness of the coconut milk, but adding hot sauce is up to you.
This is a great recipe if you like autumn squash soups but can't face the task of peeling the squash. Sweet potatoes are a lot easier to prepare and roasting them first imparts a nice caramelized flavor. Adding the spinach gives the soup a pop of color, not to mention nutrients.
Of course, it goes without saying, this would be best served with avocado toast!
• M. Eileen Brown is the Daily Herald's director of strategic marketing and innovation, and an incurable soup-a-holic. She specializes in vegetarian soups and blogs at soupalooza.com.