Day 5: "Sweet Jesus!" Mac & "Cheese" from Sweet Potato Soul
When I heard that Jenné Claiborne had written a cookbook, Sweet Potato Soul, I bought it right away. All of the recipes in the book look fantastic - Spicy Fried Cauliflower “Chicken,” Sweet Potato Green Bean Casserole, Sweet Potato Yeast Donuts, but I had yet to try any of them.
With a name like “Sweet Jesus!” Mac & “Cheese” I had some pretty high hopes for this recipe. And not one, not two, but 3 words in quotation marks? I was intrigued!
There are a few steps that make the process a little time consuming - baking the sweet potato, roasting the garlic, cooking the pasta. You could do all of these things at the same time and prep the rest of the sauce during that time which is essentially what I did, though I did pre-bake (…microwave) the sweet potato in the morning. Also, you could get away with just eating the noodles and sauce without baking the entire dish. I’m not sure the 20 minutes in the oven made that much of a difference.
This sauce is THICK. When it was coming together in the saucepan, I was kind of alarmed when I realized that starch and eventually sweet potato were going to be added to what was already a pretty thick consistency. I think next time I will increase the amount of soy milk and see what happens. I would have enjoyed it more it it were more creamy and less starchy overall, but this is just my personal taste.
This mac and “cheese” is not going to fool anyone into thinking it’s traditional mac and cheese, but I don’t think it’s trying, and I like that. The flavor is incredibly rich and unique enough to be its own thing. If you’re not a fan of nutritional yeast, proceed with caution as there is an entire cup of nooch in the recipe! I would definitely make this one again and look forward to trying many recipes from this book in the future.
