Can you believe that it’s been 6 months since Joe and I moved to England?! I SERIOUSLY can’t believe it! It’s a strange feeling because when I think back it doesn’t really feel like we’ve been here for that long but I swear the days just fly by! I went back today and read over this post I wrote just before we left the States… Joe and I miss a lot of things from our life in America, I think after 2 years it was starting to feel like home there and then we decided to come here and now we are working on settling down here. I’m not sure it will be a permanent thing… us living here but for now this is where we have to be 🙂 Who knows what will happen in another year, if we’ll be on the move again or if we’ll decide to stick it out here. In any case I often feel like a modern day nomad… the suitcases that have travelled with us since 2011 from Australia are big reminders of that for me! Anyway you gotta do these things when you’re young right! 😉

Now onto more important things like FOOD hahaha! I thought it would be fun to share with you my top 5 favourite vegetables, I know when some people think of the “paleo diet” they think we all just sit there eating bacon and eggs, and well I’m not saying we don’t but we (well I hope we do) also eat a lot of veggies and fruit! I’ve read from a couple of other paleo bloggers that when they made the switch people would often ask them what they ate if they couldn’t eat bread or pasta… as if these are the only two foods on the planet! Paleo for me personally has opened the doors to a much wider variety of food and things that I may not have ever tried before. Now I enjoy picking up a different vegetable or even fruit when I’m out shopping and I have fun experimenting with different ways to cook/use these things. For e.g. I recently picked up a cassava/yuca, I’ve NEVER tasted one before let alone cooked it but I wanted to try something different so I picked it up.

 

So my top 5 favourite veggies would have to be:

• Sweet potato.
• Cauliflower.
• Butternut squash.
• Carrots.
• Mushrooms.

The first two I don’t think I could live without! They are so versatile! I mean cauliflower mash, cauliflower pizza crust, caulifower rice, sweet potato pancakes, sweet potato mash, baked sweet potato, sweet potato desserts…. I could go on and on!

So since I LOVE sweet potato so much, yesterday I decided to try out a new recipe that had been playing around in my head. One of my favourite things, and one of the easiest that I make are patties. I make them all the time, in fact I’ve posted about them here and here. They are not only easy to make but you can make them up in bulk and have leftovers and they go well with so many things. You can wrap them up in lettuce leaves for a ‘no-bun’ burger or have them on their own with some plantain or sweet potato fries or any other vegetable for that matter. Plus they’re great as a portable meal. The point is there’s a lot that you can do with a patty!

For this recipe I decided to use sweet potato as the base of my patty… well sweet potato and mince/ground beef. For me personally though what makes this recipe are the spices I used… I mean I seriously LOVED how it came together and the whole time I was eating them for dinner last night I kept thinking damn I wish I’d made more! Joe loved them too and I’m definitely making these again!

Just a note before we start, I call these patties BUT I make mine much thinner than regular burger patties but this recipe can just as easily be turned into a regular thick patty or you could even use this recipe to make meatballs. I think I’m going to go down the meatball route next time!

Sweet Potato Patties

Ingredients:

• 453grams/1lb grass-fed ground beef.
• 1 sweet potato* (about 453grams/1lb in size).
• 1/2 small onion, finely diced.
• 1 garlic clove minced.
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon.
• 1/2 tsp ground allspice.
• 1/4 tsp ground cardamom.
• 1/4 tsp ground cumin.
• 1 tsp sea salt.
• 1/4 tsp freshly cracked black pepper.
• Grassfed butter/ghee or pastured lard for cooking.

*If you’re following the SCD protocol or just can’t have sweet potato then you can always use butternut squash instead.

Method:

Preheat oven to 200C/400F.

Line a baking tray with parchment paper or foil, stick a couple of holes with a fork in your sweet potato and place on the tray.

Bake in the oven for 45-50 minutes or until the sweet potato is nice and soft. Remove from the oven and place in the fridge to cool down.

Once the sweet potato has cooled, remove the skin and mash it up in a mixing bowl. Add in the rest of your ingredients and using your hands mix everything together.

Again using your hands take medium sized portions of the mixture and roll into a ball then flatten into a thin patty like form. Place these onto a plate as you go.

In a skillet add fat of your choice and heat on medium. Once heated add your patties in batches to cook, I find 3 or 4 at a time is best.

Cook on either side for 5-6 minutes before transferring to a paper towel lined plate.

Serve however you like. I had mine with zucchini noodles 🙂

Tell me… what are your top 5 favourite vegetables?