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By clare, September 14, 2009

I love papaya for breakfast, but it is not very sustaining on its own.  Sweet potato is amazing in its capacity to keep you going for hours and hours, but can be a bit on the heavy side to eat on its own for breakfast.  This recipe combines them along with lime juice and passionfruit, and makes for a great breakfast.  Soaking the sweet potato in lime juice and cubing them small into 1cm pieces makes it creamy and light, a great mix with the succulence of ripe papaya.

This recipe will be published in my cookbook Tropical Cuisine: Cooking in Clare’s Kitchen.

Sweet potato, papaya, lime and passionfruit salad

For two serves allow:

1 medium purple-veined white sweet potato

1/2 medium ripe red papaya (I like the Papua New Guinea and Hawaiian varieties best)

2 limes

4 passionfruit

yoghurt to serve if you wish

The night before while making dinner, peel and cube the sweet potato into 1cm pieces.  The white flesh will oxidise and brown quickly so if you want to avoid this, rub the slices with a cut lime as you go.  Place the cubes into a steamer over already boiling water and steam for about 15 minutes until the cubes are cooked through.

Take off heat and place sweet potato into a container and squeeze the lime juice over and toss through well.  Leave to marinate for about 1/2 hour, tossing occaisionally if you can.  After that, pour off any excess lime juice and place sweet potato in the fridge.  This mix will keep happily for several days, so you can increase the amount you cook at one time and have enough prepared for several days breakfasts.

At breakfast, for each person place the cubes of 1/2 a sweet potato into a bowl and cube a 1/4 of a papaya over them, then the pulp of 2 passionfruit.  Serve with yoghurt if you like, but I love the clean flavours of this salad on their own.

© Clare Richards 2009



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By clare, September 5, 2009

Sausages that needed cooking, black sapote red wine gravy that needed photographing, some gorgeous purple-veined white sweet potato from Mark Gray and tomatoes from the Atherton Tableland that cried out to be grilled.  Not your usual bangers and mash colours, but just as satisfying as the traditional version.

The intensity of purple veins in these sweet potatoes not only produce this purple-pink colour when mashed, but also provide a very good dose of the pigment anthocyanin, increasingly well documented for it’s powerful role as an antioxidant.  Tomatoes contain the  antioxidant lycopene; red wine also contains anthocyanin; and I suspect the black sapote (due to it’s colour) is another source of anthocyanin, although I have so far found only general reports and have not yet found a scientific report of such (most of the lists miss out many tropical foods).  If you know of scientific sources of nutritional analysis information for tropical produce, let me know!  So all in all this ordinary plate of bangers and mash is actually serving up a big boost for the immune system.

© Clare Richards 2009