Description
A tasty meal for meat free Monday
Ingredients
Scale
- 1 extra large sweet potato
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
- 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 cup shredded organic cheese, such as mild cheddar or Monterey Jack
- 8 multi-grain tortillas
For the sauce
- 1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce (preferably no salt added)
- 1 chipotle chile in adobe sauce, finely chopped (use 2 if you like things really spicy!)
- 1 1/2 tablespoons dried cilantro (if you have fresh use 1/8 cup)
- 1 tablespoon molasses
- 1 teaspoon sweet paprika
- generous amount freshly ground black pepper
- 2 cups fresh baby spinach leaves, coarsely chopped
Instructions
- Peel and chop your sweet potato into small chunks. Steam until it is very tender, about 15 minutes. {You can also just boil it whole if you prefer, but steaming retains more nutrients} While the sweet potato is steaming, start your sauce. Here’s all you need to get started:
- Put all of the sauce ingredients except the spinach into a small sauce pan. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently. Turn the heat to low. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
- Transfer your cooked sweet potatoes to a bowl. Add cumin, salt, and pepper and mash the potatoes.
- Add the chopped spinach to the sauce and stir until the spinach is wilted.
- Taste the sauce and add salt if you think it needs it {I didn’t}. Spread about 1/4 cup of the sauce to the bottom of a casserole dish. To assemble the tortillas, spread a layer of sauce on the bottom of a tortilla. Top with a glob of the mashed sweet potato and add 1-2 tablespoons of cheese.
- Roll it up and place it in the dish seam side down. Repeat with remaining tortillas and then top them all with the remaining sauce and cheese.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes.
- While I don’t ever cook a completely separate meal for Meghan, I am more than willing to make her meals more kid-friendly. You might have noticed in the picture above that there’s only seven enchiladas in the pan. I knew Meghan wouldn’t want this sauce on hers. It’s not really the spice I was worried about because she has eaten and liked some spicy foods, but she tends to not like tomato-based sauces at all. I hope it’s something she outgrows, but for now I knew I would up my chances of her eating this meal by leaving the sauce off for her. So I made one separate enchilada for her with just the sweet potatoes and cheese.
- Her plate looked like this:
- A few pieces of the sweet potato enchilada, some organic cheese pieces, the crispy cheese from her enchilada dish, and some shelled edamame. She gobbled up everything except the enchilada. She would not try it. I hate that more than anything. If she were to try it and not like it, well, okay. But it’s frustrating for me when she won’t even try it. Someday I will implement the you-must-at-least-try-everything rule, but she’s not old enough for that yet. For dessert, she had her favorite “chocolate pudding”, so in the end she did eat some sweet potatoes, even they weren’t in enchilada form. 🙂 I just steamed some extra sweet potatoes and whipped up the pudding while the enchiladas were in the oven. Easy peasy.
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 30 minutes
- Category: main meal
- Cuisine: Mexican
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 enchilada
- Calories: 188
- Sugar: 5.25g
- Sodium: 695mg
- Fat: 4.8g
- Carbohydrates: 25.1g
- Protein: 7g