Sweet Potato Waffle Bacon Jalapeno Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

Yes - they were as good as they sounded! Even though there was nothing crazy about this recipe (which I was just kind of winging), I knew it would make a fun post. I ended up going a little crazy with my pictures so I'm going to let them mostly tell the story. There may be some excessive gratuitous pictures of bacon...

First off, it was time to dust off the old waffle maker. I thought I'd only use this once but I have made waffles TWICE now and then, of course, last night for our hash brown waffles. 

Before getting to waffles though, I decided to throw the bacon on in the background. I really just adore this thick cut, high quality bacon from Costco. I mean, look at it. I'ts gorgeous. 

Mmmm bacon...

So now for the rest of the mis en place. The sweet potatoes were also going to need some prep. 

While they can be shredded with the skin on, I find that it ends up messing up the grates and just gets in the way so I always peel mine first. 

The best way to get hash browns from fresh potatoes is to just grate them in a cheese grater. I do have to say, this is much harder than grating cheese and will take a while. I'm not sure if a mandolin with a grate die would be better. My grater has more surface area than my mandolin so I feel like it would be more efficient.

So I'm not going to lie - steps like grating often get passed off to my boyfriend sous chef. It allows me to focus more on cooking and more complicated cuts. If you have a roommate or significant other who eats your food, I think it's totally fair to recruit them to help out with easy tasks in the kitchen. 

While he grated, I was able to take on the awful task of cutting jalapenos. One of my readers offered to send me gloves, but I haven't taken her up on that yet so I'm stuck trying to cut them using a paper towel to keep from touching them. 

But the risk of jalapeno hands and burning my eyes when I take out my contacts is totally worth it. 

So now that prep is done - let's make some waffles. I knew I'd have to grease my iron for these and also have some sort of fat to help bind the potato a bit. I used grass fed butter for this...

And then just brushed it on! 

Then I just threw my grated sweet potato into the waffle maker. It was actually pretty tough to determine how much to put in. I found the best results came from filling the waffle maker to the waffle to the point where it closed, but barely. 

The steam coming from the maker was a little concerning, but it worked out alright.

And in case you were wondering about the cheese, my skilled grater was also taking care of that in the background while I was tending waffles. 

The first waffle I made turned out the best for sure. However, they were bound very well and were very difficult to get out. My best solution was to flip the waffle maker upside and shake it to get them out. This isn't ideal and probably isn't safe. I would actually recommend tossing an egg into the sweet potato gratings to act as a binder. 

Next up was dressing the waffle! Since it would be a sandwich, I only put cheese, bacon, and jalapeno on one side and just folded it over...

...as such. However, this wouldn't melt the cheese. 

So I tossed them back into the pan where the bacon was cooked. This melted the cheese and also imparted a little more bacon flavor. Basically, win win. 

And this was the result!!! The waffles I made for Dan turned out way better than my own. However, he went jalapeno free so I feel like while the pictures of his sandwiches were prettier, mine were more complete. Frankly though, pretty plates are nice but I want something that tastes awesome.

We are definitely making these again though! It was just awesome to make some (if I'm honest here) total junk food dinner made completely out of whole, non-processed, paleo & primal (aka the cheese and butter) ingredients. Sweet potatoes, bacon, and jalapeno are obviously paleo. For the dairy, everything I used was organic and grass fed so I really aimed to pick the best options. It's just further proof that you can eat delicious foods that don't appear traditionally "healthy" but frankly, are way better for you than any store-bought, processed items filled with chemicals. 

GastroMagic - The First Culinary Stage at Outside Lands

Outside Lands is a very interesting music festival in that it's almost as much about the food, wine, beer, and other treats than it is about the music. In true San Francisco style, there is a plethora of amazing foodie treats to enjoy with your music. However, this year, they're taking it up a notch and giving you some official food pairings. Musicians and San Francisco culinary stars are coming together at the GastroMagic stage. The GastroMagic stage will have shows from about 1:30 PM to 8:00 Pm every day so it's a great place to stop by if you have a gap in your schedule. Here are my picks for the weekend.

Cocktails and Bacon

Wait what? You heard correctly! Right outside the GastroMagic tent there will be cocktails and bacon. If you love fancy drinks you can get a hand crafted cocktail from the mixologists of 15 Romolo, 1760, Alembic, The Homestead, Local Edition and Hotsy Totsy. I've had drinks at about half of those places and they are awesome. I'm really looked forward to trying something from Alembic though - I've heard amazing things for years and still haven't made it there (which is really terrible on my part). The area is also introducing... BACON LAND where there will be a Bacon Flight (a selection of the countries best bacons) and other bacon goodies. I was already planning on spending a lot of time here but with bacon and cocktails in the vicinity, I'll probably never leave.

Offal Good Music featuring Chris Cosentino

Chris Costentina, winner of Top Chef Masters and executive chef of Porcellino (formerly Incanto), will team up with a musician to talk about music, food, and skateboarding. It promises to be an Offal good time!

Beignets & Bounce Brunch with Big Freedia and Brenda’s French Soul Food

Brenda's French Soul Food is well known in the city for having awesome beignets and really long lines for brunch. If you don't want to wait a couple of hours in line for brunch this weekend, you can try to win some of Brenda's beignets by showing off your twerk.

Duck Sauce Soirée featuring Duck Sauce and Brandon Jew

This little party with feature music by Duck Sauce while Brandon Jew, the chef at the Chino, will serve tasty bites to the audience.

BBQ & Drank feat Lewis Black, Dave McLean, Paul Grieco, Dave Smith & Southpaw BBQ

Comedian Lewis Black will join a panel of judges to answer the age old question: What goes best with BBQ - beer, wine, or bourbon? My vote is for all three!

Breakdown Breakdance: Fatted Calf vs Avedano

SF butcher shops Fatted Calf and Avedano compete to see who can break down a pig the best while break dancers break down dance moves on stage. Wow, try to say fast...

Food Fight: Marlowe vs Park Tavern hosted by Craig Robinson

Marlowe and Park Tavern compete in kitchen trivia and challenges hosted by comedian Craig Robinson. Which of the two sister restaurants will come out on top??


I'll definitely be spending quite a bit of time at the GastroMagic stage nomming on flights of bacon!

Semifinals, Day 1 - Brazilian Feijoada and Even More Cheesy Bread - World Cup Eating Challenge

Updated to include link and modifications at the bottom of the post.

That was just heartbreaking. I knew Brazil losing was a very possible outcome for that game but no one wants to see their team completely fall apart. It's really hard to watch a game where it looks like your team just stopped playing. I really had no motivation to do the challenge Tuesday. I had already decided to cook the dish for whichever country lost, but I was so disappointed with the game, it was hard to bring myself to do it. I basically just wanted to turn off the TV and be like this:

But I knew I needed to see this through....

Since the game was decided in the first half an hour and I don't like torturing myself, I decided to use the second half to get my shopping done for the challenge. I had long been planning to do Brazilian feijoada - an amazing traditional black bean stew.

Beans are kind of a wonderful thing in Brazil. In a country with a bit disparity between the rich and the poor and a very small (but growing!) middle class - it's so interesting to find a dish that is eaten at all economic levels. While certain aspects of it might change - I love the idea that this is a unifying dish across all classes. In all the time I've spent in Brazil with my family, I don't think I ever went more than a couple of days without seeing feijoada on the table. Even at my parent's house in the US, it was weird to go a week without black beans. It was definitely one of the harder things to adjust to when I went to college.

As for cooking them - the first still was to boil the beans to start getting them tender. Beans take forever to cook to the right consistency and I wasn't getting the head start of soaking them so boiling ahead of time was crucial. 

The one thing I didn't like about my recipe was that is told me to drain the liquid. One of my favorite things about feijoada is just the inky color of the sauce and I feel like a lot of that went down the drain when I poured the beans into the colander. 

Next, it was time to take out my trustiest kitchen tool - the crock pot. If you don't have a crock pot, get one. This isn't like the admittedly silly waffle maker or the helpful but not necessary lemon squeezer. If you like to cook amazing food but have a job or a life or anything else that keeps you from being at home for 10 hours to check on your dish, a crock pot will save the day. Even if you don't have a job or life and are at home for 10 hours a day, they way the crock pot cooks things just gives you then most tender meats and it's still nice to be able to set it up and walk away while the cooking just happens for you. The slow cooker is easily the best cooking tool I have.

So I poured my beans into the pot and got started on the rest of the ingredients.  

What makes the black beans feijoada instead of just feijao (which just means beans) is to have tons of meaty goodness in there. I had a pork shoulder, short ribs, and sausage to add. The recipe also called for a ham hock. I had no idea what that was so I grabbed this salt pork. I'm pretty sure it's just a giant chunk of bacon. When I got home, I read the recipe again and realized the ham hock was just a big ham bone. Oops - oh well, BACON!  

I cut up my cured ham in to little pieces and quickly seared the outside then through it in the crock pot. I did the same with the pork shoulder and short ribs and then added garlic, onions, and jalapeno. I seem to keep getting more jalapeno in my eyes than my dishes though. I think it's time I invest in some kitchen gloves. 

The reason for browning the meats a bit before throwing them in the crock pot is just to give them more flavor. I don't know why but browned foods are always more delicious and while the crock pot will make a meal tender and juicy, it won't add that browning aspect. 

I let everything sit in the crock pot for a few hours while I finished work and then took a nap. See? This is why the Crock Pot is awesome. I was cooking while taking a nap. I was cooking while working. Crock Pots literally make multitasking the easiest thing in the world. 

Once the feijoada was almost ready, I threw in the sausages. I used the same liguica from the Portugal challenge since it was so delicious. Most sausages are already precooked so this is more of a heating up. If they had been in the slow cooker the whole time, they probably would have disintegrated. I've done this before. It's not ideal.

I paired my Brazilian stew with some Brazilian cheese bread and enjoyed it all over a bowl of quinoa. I don't really eat a lot of rice so I like using quinoa to fill that void. 

After that I just took a lot of gratuitous pictures of cheese bread. Turns out, that's all anyone cares about. I get more hits because of cheese bread than anything else. To be fair though - the stuff is basically crack. I had the last three pieces for breakfast today and was super bummed. I think I need to go home and make more...

Whew, because of the space between games now, this was the first post that wasn't ready and scheduled to go out ahead of time. I guess I'm caught up!

Update:
  Here's a link to the recipe I used and I've outlined what I changed:
- no oragne juice, that seemed weird to me, i just added enough water to cover the beans and some of the meat
- cured ham instead of ham hock
- coriander bc I forgot
Things I would do differently:
- not drain beans after rinsing
- actually get the ham hock. my cured ham was good but there were a ton of fat chunks that I had to pick out while eating.

Day 15 - Portugual and the end of Group Stage!!!! - World Cup Eating Challenge

The last day of group stage!!! I'm exciting for the knock out rounds even though that's going to be a little harder for me to plan ahead if I want to catch the countries as they are being eliminated. Luckily, being on the west coast, I can always wait until after the matches and then go shopping. Work hasn't been too busy so I've been able to do some research on all of my options. I am also so excited that each round will give me a couple of days off in between. Hopefully that gives some ability to catch up on posts since I don't like to put things up on weekends. 

But anyways - let's talk about food. Thursday's dinner was one of my favorites so far for so many reasons. For starters, I'd known for a while I was going to do Portugal regardless how the games went so I was able to plan ahead and make sure I had everything I needed. My Portuguese friend, Joey, sent me this site with tons of Portuguese recipes that helped me brainstorm as well. It also was just a really straight forward dinner in terms of cooking. While I got ideas from recipe sites, I didn't need to look up or follow any recipes to make these dishes. After the Honduras disaster, it was nice to have something straightforward. Lastly - it all tasted really, really good. Some of these dishes have not been good, and others I've liked but have been out of Dan's comfort zone, but we both loved all of this meal. So let's tell you how it all came together...

 I knew I was going to cook some linguica I found at the supermarket so all I had to think of were side dishes. 

Getting pre-made sausage is a nice easy way to get a meal together. The hard part has been done, you don't have to worry about getting under cooked meat, and hopefully whoever made it seasoned it well. All you have to do is throw it into a pan until they get hot and crispy.

The potatoes and bacon was instantly a no brainer. I'm definitely a bacon fanatic. I freak out if there are less than two packages in the house. I use it for everything and if I'm just eating it by itself, I save the grease for cooking later. It's so full of flavor that it imparts on whatever you cook in it. Obviously not all bacon is created equal though. The bacon in the picture above is my favorite. I get it from Costco in a two pack. For Costco, a two pack is tiny. They sell a 4 pack of mediocre bacon for the same price so a 2 pack seems like a rip off... until you notice that they are the same weight but one is juicy amazing awesome bacon and the other is thin limp meh bacon. I mean any bacon is better than no bacon, but trust me - we were buying both for a while and there was a noticeable difference. Bacon is good. Great bacon will change your life. I promise. 

Now that you have your awesome life changing bacon, the rest of the steps for this dish are super easy. I cut up the bacon into little bacony pieces and get them into a hot pan. It takes a little while but I try to put them in the pan so they aren't overlapping at first. This helps the fat melt down better and they'll be crispier. 

While the bacon is starting to cook, you can get to your potatoes. Sweet potatoes are paleo but white potatoes aren't really. They're not particularly un-paleo but there's kind of a paleo grey area that the paleo community doesn't agree on and it's full of white potatoes. My personal rule on them is about quality. For example, the big cheap russet potatoes that are about $1.50 for a ten pound bag - those are really starchy and lack a lot of nutrients. I try to go for other potato options like red skin potatoes, blue potatoes, or the yukon gold potatoes that I used for this dish. These came from Front Door Farms but Trader Joes has a ton of potato options that will be more nutrient filled.

I cut up my potatoes into little approx. one inch squares. My potatoes were all sorts of shapes and sizes but I used about a whole two pound bag of them. Once the bacon was close to crispy (you don't want it all the way there because it will keep cooking with the potatoes, just not as fast) throw the potatoes in. They'll need a while to cook - about 20 minutes so you don't have to be too vigilant but definitely mix them up every few minutes. This should get them pretty even but allow them to brown a bit. 

For seasoning - the bacon does a pretty good job but I also added some garlic powder and pepper. You can also salt it to taste. I love salt and probably have horrible blood pressure so I did a sprinkle of garlic salt as well. 

One recipe saw a lot was kale soup (actually just about everything had potatoes, kale, and/or linguica in it). While I wanted to be traditional, I didn't want an overly heavy meal so I decided to swap soup for salad and use the kale that way.

Since the potatoes and linguica had to cook a bit, it was the perfect change for me to prep my kale salad. I had tried looking for some Portuguese salad recipes but wasn't too successful so this one is probably not super authentic. 

This salad is super easy and simple. I just cut up a few kale leaves. I removed the stems since those can be kind of chewy. I cut up my last kumato and threw in some Parmesan cheese and almonds. I probably would have preferred goat cheese but I was out. I think sprinkled it with balsamic and olive oil and then mixed it all up. I went really light on dressing so the little bit leftover stayed really crisp the next day too. 

Next I had to pair wines. Ok, I'm lying, this was actually the first thing I did and put off starting to cook for as long as possible... Portugal has some AMAZING wines. Last year I went to an awesome Wines of Portugal tasting and I got to learn a lot about different Portuguese varieties. Most people are familiar with Vinho Verde and Port but there are so many more great grapes that just haven't taken off (yet) in the US. So we're going to have a little Portuguese wine lesson!

Loureiro - Loureiro is a type of Vinho Verde. Vinho Verde is actually the region in Portugal. Some of my favorite whites from the tasting were Loureiro but it's not really being exported now. Most whites are lumped together and just called "Vinho Verde" so my guess is that they're probably blends of several grapes in the region. The wine is crisp and almost spritzy with a hint of effervescence. It's the perfect hot weather wine and is just super refreshing. 

Alvarinho - Alvarinho is more commonly known by its Spanish counterpart - Albarino. It's a light white wine with high acidity and fruity aromas. It's becoming more popular among wine makers in California so maybe you'll bump into it more.

Touriga Nacional - This is another wine that's slowly becoming more popular in California. It's a pretty intense wine with a lot of berry flavor. It's probably comparable to Tempranillo. 

Touriga Franca - This is Touriga Nacional's milder counterpart (think Cabernet and Cab Franc) and is the type of Touriga I had above. It's still a pretty meaty wine but not quite as overwhelming.

Alvarelhao - A little milder still than the Touriga Franc, it's more of a medium bodied wine that can stand up better on it's own. It's really uncommon and the wine above is the only time I've ever seen it, and not recently.

Port - Probably the most well known Portuguese wine. It's known as a dessert wine and it's very rich and flavorful. Most Ports are aged as well which adds to their complexity. They are fortified with grape spirits causing them to be higher alcohol than traditional wine.

So there's a little run down on a few Portuguese wines. There are obviously a ton more and if you're interested in Portuguese wine, Wines of Portugal is a great place to start. Fenestra is also a winery in Livermore with lots of Portuguese varieties so that's also a great spot to go taste some of them. 

Anyways, I wanted to figure out what wine to have with dinner and I got really upset because I thought I didn't have any Portuguese wine. I was thinking only about Alvarinhos and was almost debating checking Trader Joes for some wine when I remembered that I had a couple of awesome Portuguese wines from Fenestra that I was saving for something special. Well, how much more special could Portuguese wine for Portuguese dinner be? I just couldn't decide which one to pair...

I decided to go with the Touriga. It's a meatier and fuller bodied wine and I knew with a dinner focused on sausage and bacon, I needed a wine that could stand up to it. A key in pairing food and wine is to keep in mind that the wine is more likely to lose a battle with food flavors. There are a lot of amazing light, beautiful wines that taste great on their own. Buy them and love them but don't eat them with an intense meal. There are wines that do great with food and it's a good thing to keep in mind while tasting. 

So finally it was food time. I really loved how this plate came together. It even ended up being Portuguese colors! Everything about the dish was amazing. 

Dan and I both went back for seconds. I seriously could have eaten all of those bacon potatoes. There was so little for me to take for lunch the next day and I was so sad that I didn't make more. I could eat this for dinner once a week. I could probably eat it more often but I love it so much I wouldn't want to get sick of it. Just everything about this meal was great - it was easy to make, the flavors were good, it had bacon, there was a fresh salad, and of course - I got to open one of my treasured bottles of Portuguese wines. 

Rocco knows all about getting seconds

After we each had our two plates, we had to keep ourselves from getting thirds and instead cuddled up on the couch like fat Roccos and watched Lost. Yes, Lost. I don't like watching good shows until long after they are cancelled so we're on Season 5 of Lost right now... 

And now I get a day off and I can go eat all of the cheeseburgers in San Francisco. Yes - unpaleo greasy awesome cheeseburgers because "everything in moderation" is the best.