Recipe of the Month: African Peanut Stew

All week, I've been nervously watching the last days of September running out without a single good idea for a new Recipe of the Month. Fortunately, Brian came to my rescue. After a quick search for "high protein vegan recipe," he tracked down something that didn't look (at first glance, at least) like anything we'd tried before: this African Peanut Stew from The Plant-Based School. He picked up most of the necessary ingredients (sweet potatoes, onion, crushed tomatoes) on our weekly Lidl run and grabbed a bunch of fresh spinach at the new SuperFresh in town, and he was ready to cook.

Brian made only a couple of minor modifications to this recipe. Knowing that I don't like things too spicy, he dialed back the red pepper flakes from 1/2 to 1/4 teaspoon and the 1/8 teaspoon of black pepper to just a pinch. He cooked everything else just as directed, and it was pretty straightforward. Not lightning-fast, since it takes half an hour on the stove (or in this case, the new induction burner) to get the sweet potatoes tender, but it didn't require a lot of baby-sitting. The only real work was the ten minutes of chopping, grating, and sauteing before tossing everything in the pot.

Then there was the matter of garnishes. The recipe recommended topping each bowl with "a small handful of crushed, toasted, unsalted peanuts, a generous squeeze of lime juice, and some pickled red onions." Brian wasn't entirely convinced the lime juice would work with the rest of the dish, so rather than waste a fresh lime on it, he just got out the bottle of lime juice and set that on the side. (As it turned out, his instincts were good: neither of us felt that the stew would benefit from this addition.) But he did chop and toast some peanuts and whip up a small batch of the Quick Pickled Red Onions from the same recipe site: sliced red onion steeped for half an hour in a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, salt, sugar, and red pepper. Since I'm not a huge fan of onions (and they don't love me, either), I skipped this garnish, but Brian tried it and found that it did indeed go well with the stew. However, he didn't think it added so much that he would go to the effort of making it again.

The stew, on the other hand, was something we both deemed worthy of being added to our recipe rotation. It's healthy, vegan, and easy to make, and it doesn't call for any expensive or hard-to find ingredients. And it offers a complex, satisfying mixture of flavors and textures, with chick peas, tender chunks of sweet potato, and chewy strands of spinach in a flavorful broth blended from tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, pepper, and peanut butter. This combination sounds quite unusual, but I realized after a few mouthfuls that it wasn't so different from another dish Brian is very fond of: the tahini-spiked Garlic, Chick-pea and Spinach Soup from Linda Frazer's Vegetariana, However, that recipe isn't vegan (it calls for heavy cream), so this one fits better into our current diet.

The one thing we might do differently next time we make this dish is to plan ahead and make sure we have a suitable bread to serve with it. The recipe suggests either naan or pita bread, but all we had on hand was a loaf of Brian's sturdy whole-wheat bread and some whole-wheat tortillas. So instead, we accompanied the meal with some waffles left over from that morning's breakfast. They were made with whole-wheat flour too, but their lighter texture made them a closer approximation to what the Plant-Based Schoolteachers had in mind.