Sweet Potato Garlic Knots

Recipe Review: The sweet potato adds a unique flavor to these easy to make garlic knots.

After the success of my valentines day pretzel experiment I've suddenly found myself unafraid of making my own bread. The yeast and the rising and the kneading all sounded too many possible steps that I might flub. Now it just seems silly that I waited so long. Attach the dough hook to your KitchenAid and no kneading is necessary. Perfect dough just forms before your eyes. I've always wanted to make my own garlic knots, so they became my next project. A quick tastespotting search led me to a variety using sweet potatoes- yum!

Sweet Potato Garlic Knots
adapted from: kholercreated.com
yield: 16 rolls

1 cup warm water
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 tablespoons agave nectar
1/2 cup sweet potato puree
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 1/2 cups flour
6 cloves minced garlic
1/8 cup olive oil

To make sweet potato puree: Wash and peel sweet potato and cut into 1 inch squares. Place in a large pot of boiling water and cook for 20-25 minutes, or until fork tender. Remove from heat, drain, and return to pot. Beat with hand mixer until smooth.

Pour warm water into the bowl of your stand mixer and add yeast. Let sit for 10 minutes, then add in honey, olive oil and sweet potato puree. Mix until well combined.

Attach dough hook to mixer. On lowest setting add flour and salt very slowly. Continue to mix until dough forms, about 5 minutes. Remove dough, rinse and dry bowl. Use olive oil to generously oil the inside of the bowl. Return dough to bowl and roll to coat with the olive oil. Place in a warm area, cover with saran wrap and allow dough to rise for at least one hour, until it has doubled in size.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Divide dough into 16 equal pieces. On a floured surface roll them into 8 inch strips and tie into knots, tucking ends under each knot. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until golden. While rolls are baking mince garlic and combine with olive oil. Brush a generous coating onto rolls immediately after removing from oven. Lightly salt rolls with fresh ground sea salt. Allow to cool for 3-5 minutes before serving.

printable recipe

These were really yummy. Nothing beats fresh bread out of the oven. Spread them with some herbed butter and they are heaven. I can't wait for the fall when I can try this out using pumpkin puree. I brought these to a housewarming potluck, and I was surprised how quickly they disappeared. I want to experiment with making the dough in advance and then either freezing or refrigerating the knots. How awesome would it be to have them all ready and just pop them in the oven?

Last weekend out fridge broke down so we found ourselves frantically calling people on craigslist and ended up with a huge chest freezer for only 40 bucks! I'm actually excited because now we can really make the most of our costco membership. Also I now will have the opportunity to do things like cooking huge batches of chili and freezing it, or buying sale turkey's after thanksgiving. So if you know if any freezer friendly recipes, or tips or maximizing the freezer let me know!

Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Cakes

This is a very exciting blog post for me. To start off its my 50th blog post! Since I started blogging in the fall I have really come to love it and look forward to every post that I write. Blogging has lead me to try making new things that I never would have tried, and I now have new hobbies to pursue, (cake/cupcakes decorating, and food photography) that are fueled by the blog!

Second- Kevin and I invented the most delicious food! Usually I cook from a recipe, and I was making a sweet potato and spinach hash that I had seen in Real Simple magazine, Kevin was watching the process (which involves grating the sweet potatoes) and suggested that we make them into cakes and fry them like latkes. Since this was a huge departure from the recipe I let Kevin take the lead, and we mixed in an egg and some bread crumbs to the spinach mix, fried them up, and oh. my. goodness. They were amazing! We were both incredibly surprised by how great these tasted. No they aren't the prettiest, and we probably should have baked them instead of fried but wow. Just wow.

Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes

Quick Recipe Review: Easy to make, melt in your mouth decadent sweet potatoes with kick (kick provided by Jack Daniels) 

I'm still recovering from thanksgiving, and I have a whole lot of recipes to type up here. I'm going to try to make the effort to get them all posted this week, unfortunately I don't have photos for each dish, but I'll post what I've got. Starting off with Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes.

Kevin had been subtly hinting saying that he wanted to have sweet potatoes for a few days before Thanksgiving. Each time I would say "Well should we make them?" "No no, we've got enough stuff to make already" The last straw was when we went to the grocery store Thanksgiving morning and there were some sweet potatoes improperly labeled as yam's and on sale for 50 cents a pound. (Check out this post for sweet potato/yam identity theft information) As soon as we got home and started cooking, Kevin mentioned the sweet potatoes and how good they were, again.

Sweet Potato Pot Roast

Quick Review: The pot roast turned out incredibly tender, and I really liked using a crock pot for easy prep. I used a little too much wine so cut that down a little when I wrote up the recipie and next time will put the veggies in half way though cooking

Its fall and much cooler in the evenings in San Diego. Whenever this happens it makes me crave hearty comfort food. Kevin must have been on the same page as me when he brought up that he loves pot roast and brisket. I have never made a pot roast (it's actually quite possible that I've never even eaten it) and then didn't even know what a brisket was. (Turns out its a cut of meat, usually cooked slowly at a low temperature) After much googling I decided that I wanted to make the pot roast in my crock pot. I had used the crock pot to make pulled pork this summer (it was soooo yummy. I should make that again soon) but never done a whole dish, with meat and veggies in the crock pot.