West African Sweet Potato Stew

One of the things I love about having a kitchen filled with last year’s vegetables is that I have the ingredients I need for many dishes without a trip to the grocery store. That was the case yesterday when I tried a recipe a customer of my husband’s sent home with him. While he was working on renovations in her home she was cooking soup and making a copy of the recipe for me. It turns out to be a good one.

Kathleen sent over a recipe for West African Sweet Potato Stew. I can always use another way to utilize those nutritious sweet potatoes, so I immediately scanned the ingredient list and was surprised at the variety of vegetables it uses – cabbage, green beans, tomatoes, tomato juice and onions. I had everything I needed from our garden except the onions. I slightly adapted the recipe to use fresh sweet potatoes instead of canned, so I had to cook it a little longer to be sure they were soft all the way through.

Add to that a little ginger and red pepper flakes plus half-a-cup of peanut butter and you have a rich, vitamin-packed stew. I ate it as a soup yesterday but I have a feeling that after that red pepper has had time in the refrigerator to further infuse throughout the soup, I might need to eat it over rice to cut the spice. It will definitely warm me up on another gray winter day.