These southwestern stuffed sweet potatoes are a fun and tasty twist on traditional loaded potatoes. Making loaded spuds is typically an ordeal — you bake them, prep and cook the filling, fill them, top them with cheese, and bake them again. I like this recipe because it simplifies a couple of those steps so the dish comes together quickly. Plus, these are just as delicious cold as they are hot! This is one of my go-to recipes when I don’t have a lot of time to cook during the week. Unlike white potatoes, baked sweet potatoes stay nice and soft in the fridge, and I usually bake a couple of them every Sunday for convenient weeknight eating. Having baked the potatoes in advance, this dish comes together in about 15 minutes flat — and it’s fun, tasty, and good for you, too! You might notice that there’s no oil in these, if that kind of thing is of interest to you. Rather, they’re topped with a cool and creamy avocado-based sauce — glorified guac, if you will. Nothin’ but whole food goodness in here. Print Southwestern Stuffed Sweet Potatoes with Avocado Sauce Author: Claryn Recipe type: Main Cuisine: Tex-Mex Cook time:  45 mins […]

Fall has officially returned, and with it my penchant for soups. This broccoli tahini bisque is almost as easy to make as it is luscious. Yeah, “luscious.” You read that right! Restaurant Week wasn’t something I’d ever taken note of, probably on account of the fact that I’m not a middle-aged rich suburbanite foodie. So it was purely coincidental that the first time I went to G-Zen, a fancy vegan restaurant in Branford, was during Restaurant Week. Really, it was serendipitous, because G-Zen is expensive, and my partner and I got to try a half dozen of their dishes for the price of one meal. The first thing I tasted was their broccoli tahini bisque, and it completely blew me away. Though I’ve tried a dozen or so of their offerings since, I remain convinced that this soup is one of their best dishes. As such, I was compelled to either make my own rendition of this soup or embark on a career of robbing banks to support my shamefully expensive soup habit. After some careful deliberation, I chose the former path. Having read a little bit about G-Zen’s philosophy, I knew that my central task would be to keep […]

Overnight oats are my default breakfast in the summer, but once the temperatures begin to drop, I like to spend chilly mornings cozied up with a hot bowl of oatmeal. This banana nut porridge with rolled oats, quinoa, and teff is currently my favorite weekend breakfast. It’s kind of funny how enthusiastic I’ve gotten about oatmeal over the past few years. Growing up, I ate the same thing for breakfast every single morning before school: a slice of toast with cinnamon sugar or a bowl of instant oatmeal. I hated the monotony so much that I swore off breakfast one day and refused to touch toast or oatmeal for several years. These days, I can take or leave toast, but ever since I began eating oatmeal again of my own volition, I just can’t get enough of the stuff. Of course, you still couldn’t convince me to eat the same thing for breakfast every day. To keep things interesting, I like to incorporate different types of grains into my morning bowl of porridge — it mixes up the texture, and adds variety to my diet. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been eating a lot of quinoa these days, so it makes […]

For the first couple of months of summer, I made fresh spring rolls like it was my job. By the time August rolled (ha!) around, I’d mostly lost my patience for assembling them. I got lazy, okay? And thusly was Deconstructed Summer Roll Salad born! With kale, mango, cucumber, bell pepper, cilantro, lime, and peanut dressing, this salad is everything that’s good about summer rolls, minus the annoyance of wrapping them up into actual rolls. In 15 minutes, you can throw together a bowl with all the flavor of fresh, crispy summer rolls and dipping sauce. It’s all going to the same place anyway, right? Say it with me: everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system. 5.0 from 1 reviews Print Deconstructed Summer Roll Salad Author: Claryn Recipe type: Main   Ingredients 1 bunch (~4 cups) lacinato (dinosaur) kale, destemmed and chiffonaded 1 cucumber, peeled and julienned 1 red bell pepper, julienned 1 mango, thinly sliced ½ bunch of cilantro, roughly chopped ½ a lime ⅓ c natural, unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter ⅓ c water or room-temperature black tea 2 Tbsp fresh lime juice 1 Tbsp tamari 1 Tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and grated ½ Tbsp maple syrup 1 garlic […]

So I’ve already taught you how to drink black beans and cucumbers. Next up? Beets. Enter this gloriously hued, brightly flavored strawberry beet smoothie. Do I qualify as a full-fledged weirdo yet? There was a time when green smoothies sounded weird and excessively healthy to my ear, but now that I’m fully immersed in smoothie culture, I’m well aware that just because you added a handful of spinach to what is, in essence, a milkshake, doesn’t mean you’ve made some sort of cancer-curing elixir. I love adding greens to smoothies as much as the next blogger, but a handful of spinach will turn just about any pale-colored mixture neon green, and just isn’t going to have that much of an effect on the nutritional content of your drink. If I may be frank: green smoothies are pedestrian. If that isn’t a cutting insult, y’all, I don’t know what is! So I get really excited about smoothies that involve vegetables beyond greens. I love smoothies that incorporate carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, cucumber, and even broccoli. (Okay, maybe I’ve gone off the deep end a little bit!) I’m not going to lie to you; if you don’t already like beets, you are […]