Sweet Temptation - Casserole with Sweet Potatoes and Anchovies

Dear Readers,

This post marks a couple of important changes in the direction of this blog. First, my friend Michael, who used to coauthor this blog, has gone on to set up his own, all-vegan blog (http://hififood.blogspot.co.uk/ - check it out!), where you will also find his old recipes. Second, this blog will no longer only contain all-vegan and all-vegetarian recipes. What it will contain is gluten- and sugar-free recipes made of organic or locally sourced seasonal ingredients - whenever those options are available. Many of the recipes will also continue to be vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free, lactose-free, egg-free and grain-free. As before, all the recipes will be tagged with the appropriate labels, so that you can quickly and easily find the recipes that suit your individual needs.

To start off the new era, I am posting a recipe inspired by a traditional Swedish dish called Janssons frestelse (Jansson's temptation). I decided to name it "Sweet Temptation" because, instead of potatoes, I am using sweet potatoes and carrots to make it.

SWEET TEMPTATION

a large orange sweet potato
two small carrots
a smallish onion (or 1/2 of a large onion)
2-3 cloves of garlic
about 40 grams of anchovy fillets in olive oil (with the oil, the total weight should be about 80 grams)
a small bunch of fresh parsley
freshly ground pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Cut the sweet potato in half. Slice the sweet potato and the carrots thinly. 
3. Cut the onion into rings.
4. Finely chop the garlic and the parsley.
5. Place the ingredients in layers in an all-metal pot, starting from a layer of sweet potato slices.
6. Add a little bit of water (about a fourth or a third of the dish's height) into the pot. You might also want to add in a little bit of the olive oil from the anchovy package. Beware, though - it is very salty! Oh, and please do not add any salt to this dish; the salt in the anchovies will be enough. In fact, you might even want to rinse some of the anchovies in water to make them less salty.
7. Place the pot on the stove, and bring the water to a boil. 
8. When the water starts boiling, place the dish into the oven.
9. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the potatoes and carrots are cooked.
10. Enjoy!

Annika

P.S. Step 7 is optional. I only do it to speed up the cooking process a bit. If you skip Step 7, you can use a glass or a ceramic oven dish instead of an all-metal pot.

Applying the A Formula

For the past six months or so, I have been cooking a lot using the so-called "A Formula" ("A" obviously stands for "Annika"). It's a fast way of cooking that I use, for instance, to prepare something for lunch at work. The dishes are either based on brown rice or quinoa and, for two reasons, the cooking time is basically the same as the cooking time of those grains: 1) the rest of the ingredients are washed, chopped etc. while the grains are already cooking and 2) the rest of the ingredients are either left uncooked or steamed in the same pot with the grains (towards the end of the cooking time of the grains). The A Formula can be used to prepare an amazing variety of vegan/vegetarian dishes, and most of those dishes are delicious either warm or cold.

Most of the time I just improvise and apply the A Formula to whatever I have in my fridge and my spice cupboard. The below dish is a delightful example of one of those improvised dishes cooked using the A Formula. It was delicious (although I had feared that it would turn out horrible because of the radishes) and I'm going to try to recreate it one of these days to double-check that the amounts of the ingredients in the below recipe are OK.

APPLYING THE A FORMULA

0.5 dl white quinoa
1 dl water
a clove of garlic
a large carrot
5-6 radishes
1-2 tablespoons of chopped fresh coriander
leek
about 1 teaspoon of curcuma powder
a pinch of chili powder
1.5 tablespoons of extra virgin coconut oil
the juice of a quarter of a lemon
sea salt

1. Rinse the quinoa well.
2. Add the water and the salt in the pot and bring to a boil under a lid.
3. Add the quinoa, the curcuma powder and the chili powder.
4. Peel the garlic and chop it finely.
5. Peel and wash the carrot and cut it into very thin, round slices.
6. Wash the radishes and cut them into very thin slices.
7. Wash the coriander and chop it finely.
8. Wash the leek and cut about 1 cm of it finely.
9. When 5-10 minutes of the cooking time of the quinoa remain, add the garlic into the pot (5 minutes if you want a stronger garlic taste).
10. When 2-3 minutes of the cooking time remain, add the chopped coriander and the carrot slices.
11. When the quinoa is ready, switch the heat off, add the radishes, the leek, the coconut oil and the lemon juice, and mix the ingredients well.
12. Serve straight away, or let the dish cool down (like I did), and enjoy!

Annika