Recipe 13: Sweet Potato Salad

Coincidentally, as it was time to make this recipe, I was craving some baked sweet potatoes and today, I'm actually craving this exact salad again. Let’s just jump right into talking about this tasty dish because, obviously, I'm hungry.

The Shopping Experience

As I said, I was craving sweet potatoes so I actually had a few at home already. Green onions are another staple in my fridge so I didn’t need to buy that. I also had some leftover feta cheese from the Watermelon Salad, so this was the cheapest salad to shop for. All I needed was tomatoes and arugula.

I looked in a couple of different places for mixed colour tomatoes but I’m guessing they are out of season because I had no luck despite remembering seeing them in grocery stores in the summertime. Luckily, I don’t think the colour of the tomatoes really matters for flavour so I subbed in my favourite tomatoes: Roma/plum tomatoes.

The Cooking Experience

The sweet potatoes had to be in the oven for an hour so this amount of wait time actually meant I had ample time to prep everything else. An instruction in the recipe said to “roughly chop” the tomatoes but I didn’t really know what that meant so I just quartered them. Once again in regards to the tomatoes, I think this was mostly a visual aesthetic choice.

Fun fact, did you know you could replant green onions by just making sure you chop off enough (about an inch and a half) of the root/white part of the onion? Since learning that, I always replant my green onions in just a small mason jar with water filled to just under the root.

When I took the sweet potatoes out of the oven, I had the urge to peel the skins off first because I never ate sweet potatoes with the skins on but I suppose leaving them on means more fibre?

In order to make this a more filling meal, since both my boyfriend and I had pretty small lunches, I cooked up two chicken breasts to eat alongside the salad.

The Eating Experience

My boyfriend and I both really enjoyed this salad as a meal with our chicken breasts. The warm sweet potatoes added a cosy feeling to the freshness of the tomatoes and arugula. As usual, the feta helped to balance the sweetness, this time from the sweet potatoes, with some saltiness. The freshly chopped green onions combined with the smell of everything else to make for a very aromatic, multidimensional scent.

Despite all the goodness of the salad, I will say that the arugula didn’t do much to add flavour. I’m assuming the reason that it’s the green of choice in this salad is because it's light and soft as to not conflict with the softness of all the other ingredients.

Final Thoughts

This made for a surprisingly hearty meal that I can also imagine eating on a summer day. I'll have to tackle it again when those mixed coloured tomatoes are back in season.

Edit: Either my boyfriend or I ended up putting the box of arugula into our mixing bowl cupboard. Major facepalm, we used only a tiny fraction of the box so we ended up wasting like 7/8 of the arugula. Ugh, I hate food waste. I'll have to make sure that next time, we don't have a brain fart.

Total estimated cook time: Prep 9 minutes. Bake 1 hour.

Total actual cook time: 1 hour and 14 minutes total.