cooking without marc.

...when he's out of town, Sara and I take advantage to cook...especially things Marc doesn't like (fish, vegetarian, pasta, etc.) So this morning, knowing we had three sweet potatoes left over from the weekend, we decided to get creative. I set Sara loose on our "magazine cookbook" (a binder full of recipes from all the years we've subscribed to Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Southern Living, Martha Stewart) With the vague direction that we could substitute sweet pototoes for squash or regular potatoes in many recipes. She decided on this one (actually not a recipe I'd flagged in the cookbook; this one simply shared the page with baked penne with broccoli and three cheeses - a recipe I've never made :-)

So we made a list to buy onion, zucchini, diced tomatoes, garbanzo beans and olives (appears I haven't done a very good job of keeping a well-stocked pantry) and I shopped at Harry's on the way home.

The vegetable stew went according to plan. We did substitute one teaspoon of oregano for the orange peel and ours did cook much longer than the recipe indicated, but the results were fine (eventually).

The potato pancakes were a different story. We usually have some sort of binder in our pancakes, like an egg? This recipe is potatoes, onion and flour. In the interest of keeping healthy, we didn't modify that part. But when Sara started to cook them, not so good. The potatoes didn't hold together and after 10 minutes we had something resembling hash. Which seemed ok. So we added the rest of the potatoes and made hash.

And served it with the stew.

And it was very good. We'll definitely make the stew again. But maybe we'll just serve it over mashed sweet potatoes!