Coconut Sweet Potato Curry

I love sweet potatoes. I buy them sporadically at the grocery store with the best of intentions, and usually end up making sweet potato fries out of them. But I knew there was something more I could do with them. A few months ago, I was Googling sweet potato recipes and found one for Coconut Sweet Potato Curry.

I thought it sounded interesting, so I bookmarked it. A few weeks after that, I bought the two pounds of sweet potatoes it required. Then I promptly forgot about them. Luckily, sweet potatoes last for.ev.er. so I finally made the dish a couple of days ago.  It was completely worth the wait!

Here is what you need: a pound and a half of sweet potatoes; one large yellow onion; one lemon; six cloves of garlic; one (at-least) two inch piece of fresh ginger root; thai red curry paste; a 15 oz. can of unsweetened coconut milk; 3 cups of vegetable broth; and a bit of olive oil. This dish is actually vegan! (Unless you use chicken broth, like I did, because I didn’t have any vegetable broth.) I told my sister it was a vegan dish and she said, “Ew…why would you eat that?”

Vegan doesn’t always mean bad!

Boil (or roast) the sweet potatoes until they are soft.

Then skin them.

I like to boil them, because the skins just fall off. See below….

Set the sweet potatoes aside. Prepare three cups of vegetable broth. (Please ignore my inability to measure correctly…cough cough.)

Set the broth aside now! Chop a whole yellow onion into bite-sized pieces. If you like a more chunky curry, make sure that the pieces are smaller. I wanted to make a smoother curry, more soup-like, so I knew I would be throwing most of them int he blender and didn’t worry about it too much.

Chop up the garlic. Yum, garlic. Is there anything better?

Peel your fresh ginger root (which also, by the way, lasts forever.) To peel, just cut away the brown outer skin.

And yes, it is supposed to be stringy like that. I’ve never cut up fresh ginger before, so I wasn’t sure. I texted my dad as I was cooking: “Is fresh ginger supposed to be this fibrous?”  My dad: “yes.”

Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil in your pan.  This might have been excessive, except that A.) this is my favorite pan and it isn’t non-stick, and B.) nothing – nothing - is worse than charred and blackened, raw onion chunks!

Sautée the onions, garlic, and ginger in the pan. Keep the heat low so they don’t get burned! Cook until translucent.

Sautée until nice and pretty.

When the mixture is cooked, add two teaspoons of red curry paste.

This stuff is, like, three bucks at the grocery store. It is also suuuuper strong! But tasty.

Stir the paste into the pan.

Let the paste-onion mixture sizzle for two minutes.  Then, add the three cups of broth you prepared.

Next up is the coconut milk.

Give it a decent stir, and bring it to a boil. Let it boil – uncovered – for 15 minutes.

Add three and a half tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon.

While that is boiling, I put my sweet potatoes in the blender. I wanted it to be more of a curry-flavored (in taste), bisque-like (in texture) soup. So I purrée’d them until they strongly resembled baby food. (Sick, I know, but tasty.)

This was about halfway there.

Mix the sweet potatoes back into the rest of the soup!

And, can I just say, yum. Totally healthy, too, which is impressive (for me.) It’s nice a tangy, and not too spicy. Although if you like spice you can always add more curry paste!

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