Sweet potatoes on Friday!

Hey all! We'll be digging sweet potatoes from the garden on Friday, and with any luck, you'll be getting at least a couple pounds worth coming home with your kids that evening. Yum!! I can't wait. I wanted to give you one of my favorite sweet potato recipes - I've adapted this recipe from a cookbook called Moosewood Celebrates, and I've tried it using both sweet potatoes and butternut squash....I bet it would work with other winter squashes too, like pumpkin, acorn squash, buttercup squash, or whatever you've got. It's good alone as a side dish, or as a main course together with some rice or a salad or something like that. And, there's always leftover peanut sauce, which you can save for a couple weeks in the fridge and put on noodles or meats or greens, or really whatever floats your boat. Good stuff, I hope you enjoy!

Sweet Potatoes & Eggplant with Peanut Sauce
adapted from a recipe in "Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates"
Moosewood writes: "This is a richly flavorful dish, inspired by the foods of West Africa, where true yams would replace our North American sweet potatoes and where a paste of groundnuts might replace the crunchy peanut butter. It is a good example of Kwanza cookery, drawing inspiration from mother Africa and using domestic foods of the American South. We think the sauce has a real kick to it (but we know it doesn't hold a candle to the fiery hotness of some West African cooking)."

Baked sweet potatoes and eggplant
2 medium purple eggplants (or 5-10 smaller eggplants, or Japanese eggplants)
1 large bell pepper, red or green, seeded and diced
2 - 4 cups diced sweet potatoes (depends how much you've got!)
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
pinch of salt

Spicy peanut sauce
2 tablespoons sesame chili oil
- or -
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or plain sesame oil and 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder or cayenne pepper (or more, if you like spicy food!)
1-1/2 cups chopped onion (one or two medium onions)
2 tablespons grated fresh ginger root (if you've got it - you can also skip it)
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter, preferably the natural, unsalted kind
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons molasses or honey
2 tablespoons white or cider vinegar
2 cups tomato juice - or - 2 cups crushed tomatoes (comes in a can)
salt to taste

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a 9 x 13 inch baking pan.
Chop up the eggplants, sweet potatoes and bell pepper into chunks about half an inch wide. Mix them together with the oil so that everything's evenly coated, and then put it all in the baking pan and bake until it's soft, but not too soft - usually about 30 minutes.
While that's in the oven, make the peanut sauce! Heat the oil in a saucepan on medium-high heat and saute the onions for about 3 minutes. Add the ginger root (if you're using it) and the cayenne or chili pepper (if you're using that), and saute it for another minute or two. Then, add the peanut butter, soy sauce, molasses or honey, vinegar, and tomato juice or crushed tomatoes. Stir it all up, then cover the pot, turn down the heat, and let it all get hot and smooth. Stir it frequently so the bottom doesn't scorch. At this point, you can taste test, and add more salt or cayenne/chili if you want it.
When both dishes are done, you're ready to go! You can mix some of the peanut sauce right in to the baked vegetables, or you can dish out the veggies and then spoon the sauce over top. This would be really good over rice. When the peanut sauce cools again, it'll get a lot thicker - if it gets too thick, you can thin it out a bit by adding a little more tomato juice or water.