Spinach Salad with Roasted Sweet Potatoes

It’s been a relatively hectic late winter/early spring for me and that has meant a lot more meals eaten out or ordered in. This kind of eating really takes a toll on me, and after a month or two of it, I find myself craving a home-cooked, vegetable-heavy meal.

I satisfied my most recent of these cravings with this tasty and wholesome salad that I more or less made up. I love roasted sweet potatoes and cannot get enough of this amazing salad that I wrote about last year, but I thought it was time for a change.

So I took baby spinach, roast sweet potatoes, and a bunch of other stuff I thought would taste good and mixed it together. Result? It tasted good.

Obviously, eating out frequently isn’t the soundest financial decision, but what frustrates me most about doing it is how hard it is to eat even moderately healthfully when you’re not cooking for yourself. I’m not saying there aren’t healthy options out there, just that it’s shocking to me how hard it is to get vegetables (not french fries) at the sort of $10 a head restaurants I tend to go to when I’m hungry and lazy. On top of which, a lot of the options that do exist tend to be too consciously Health Food and are therefore bad.

I think there’s a real market out there for a mid-price eat-in/take-out/delivery place that does slightly upscale, health-conscious versions of what we in the South call Meat and Three. A quarter roast chicken or a small piece of fish is neither expensive nor difficult to prepare, and you could just pair these and a another couple of protein options (including a vegetarian one) with a choice of 10 or so rotating sides. I’ll call it Blue Plate Special, and it will make a fortune. Interested investors can contact me at anytime at foodjunta@gmail.com.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep getting fat.

Spinach Salad with Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Here’s what I put in this one, but obviously you should improvise like crazy:

Baby spinach
Dried cranberries
Sliced almonds
Feta cheese
Roasted sweet potatoes

To prepare the salad, I cut the sweet potatoes into small-ish cubes. (I washed the skin well, but left it on. It’s good for you!) I tossed them in a very generous amount of olive oil and salt, and then threw them in a 375 degree oven for about 45 minutes, but cooking time will vary depending on the size of your cubes. Just check them regularly after about half an hour.

I assembled all the other ingredients in a bowl, and here’s where I think I got clever. Instead of mixing a separate dressing, I thought to myself, why couldn’t I just use the oil from the sweet potatoes? I was inspired by the spinach salad with warm bacon dressing that I made last summer, where the bacon fat is used as the oil for the dressing. So when the sweet potatoes were done, I just dumped the whole lot onto the rest of the salad, and tossed well. Everything got nicely coated in tasty oil, and the heat wilted the spinach just the tiniest bit. Then I squeezed a lemon over the salad, tossed it again, added salt and pepper to taste, and felt very pleased with myself.