I was planning meals last week and thought the  kale and cannellini-stuffed sweet potato  meal I'd made before sounded good, but then I remembered a friend's recent Instagram post that showed a pan full of sweet potato "noodles," and I was reminded that I wanted to try that out. I'd had some  success  making "zoodles," or zucchini noodles, and I wanted to experiment more with alternative forms of pasta. So I basically decided to deconstruct the stuffed sweet potato meal and switch out kale for spinach. Ingredients 2 medium-to-large sweet potatoes 2 bags baby spinach 1 BPA-free box cannellini beans 2 cloves garlic, chopped olive oil salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne I used the same piece of equipment--a mandolin--as I used for the zoodles. I had a little more difficulty with the raw sweet potatoes, as they're much firmer than zucchini, so I had to press the potato across the blade with more force, which made me more likely to also slice a finger ...

This is one of my favorite meals. It's easy, it's beautiful, and it's full of so-called  superfoods . The most taxing part of this meal is baking the potatoes. It seems to take at least an hour at 375 for two medium potatoes. The rest is easy:  Over medium heat, toss in olive oil, chopped garlic, spices (I like cayenne and cumin), then kale, and let the kale sort of wilt, but not for too long. I like to add in the can of beans at the last minute, as they're already cooked and only need heating. All of this takes 5-10 minutes.  Once the potatoes are full baked, cut in half and add in the kale/cannellini mixture. I have never been able to properly stuff my potatoes, mostly because they're too hot for me to slit and then squish open with my hands. An obvious solution would be to use a towel to do it, but I figure it's all going to get mixed together either way. So my picture is not as neat as it would be with a proper stuffing, but I still think it's l...

My new dinner creation this week was a bit of an experiment. I'd been craving a Salad Nicoise (pronounced "nee-'shwa" in butchered-French English) recently and decided to make my own. But I'd also been craving sweet potato fries, so I swapped out the white potatoes in a traditional Salad Nicoise and made baked sweet potato fries on the side. I didn't include tomatoes, because Tim doesn't care for raw tomatoes, so I added carrots instead (why carrots? I don't know). I also didn't add the hard-boiled egg, mostly because I forgot. But I did retain the lettuce, tuna, green beans, olives, and vinaigrette.  For the sweet potato fries, I peeled two medium-sized sweet potatoes and cut them into wedges or cubical lengths (I'm at a loss for words), but this was more difficult than I anticipated, due to the cylindrical shape of the sweet potato. My skills got better toward the end, though. I added olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, and turmer...