Guys, this Sweet Potato Bowls recipe is EVERYTHING you want in your dinner! After two nights of chicken dinners- BBQ Chicken Zucchini Boats and Hawaiian Chicken, Ben was ready for a meatless dinner. Finding meatless dinners for my man has been more challenging than I thought it would be. If you just search dinner ideas or quick dinners on Pinterest, a lot of yummy ideas show up, most of them involving chicken or red meat. I went on the hunt for some vegetarian ideas and somehow ended up looking at vegan dinners which was also not what I was looking for either. After some endless scrolling I went back to my January Food Challenge Board and found that I had pinned 4 similar variations of a sweet potato bowl! I would get something similar for lunch when I was using MealPal for lunch in the city (back when people actually went to work full time). I was excited to make my own version with this recipe!
Ingredients– I was a little hesitant looking over the ingredients and seeing cumin and chili pepper listed. For those of you who don’t know, I am a total whimp when it comes to spicy food! I pushed through my spice fears and got to cooking. I think the hardest part of this meal was getting the spice concoction correct! I made sure that I measured everything properly here- there was too much at stake to mess this one up!
I started peeling the potatoes as directed and was ready to give up and just bake them with the skin – peeling those things is harder than it looks! Thankfully Ben stepped in and saved the day! Once the three potatoes were cut up, we mixed them with the exact 1 tablespoon and 2 teaspoons of spice mix as directed (too risky to improvise here) and set in the oven to bake.
Since we were going to try the Trader Joe’s Cilantro Dressing instead of making our own with the rest of the spices and sour cream (Ben is NOT a sour cream fan), I decided to mix the beans in with the remaining spices for extra flavor.
Chelsea also recommends using fire roasted corn in her recipe. We LOVE the Trader Joe’s frozen Mexican Roasted Corn with Cotija Cheese! I threw it in the frying pan while Ben went to work on the rice. I decided to add some freshly squeezed lime to rice when he first put the water on to boil instead of waiting until the end (may have read the directions wrong). Apparently the rice came out “harder than usual” according to Ben and needed extra time to sit. Next time I will be adding the lime to the rice after it is fully cooked.
The potatoes had to be flipped at 15 minutes and cooked for another 15 minutes with the beans in the oven. It was easy enough and came out perfectly! We set our bowls and topped with cilantro and the dressing. May have forgot to include the red pepper though 🤷♀️
Overall Rating– We really LOVED these Sweet Potato Bowls and we would absolutely cook it again for dinner in the future. This might have been one of our all-time favorites! It is an easy, flavorful, meatless dinner! We even fought over who got to eat the leftovers.
As always, let me know if you try this one sticking straight to the recipe or modifying as you go!
Original Recipe: https://www.chelseasmessyapron.com/sweet-potato-taco-bowls/
xoxo
Krysta
