Welcome to my humble abode! Please take no notice of the dust on the shelves, the hand-me-down furniture and the fact that you can barely walk around the kitchen table without bumping something…it’s all about the food, you know!

Even that may not always look so fantastic, but I put a lot of effort into both taste and nutrition. I take deep joy in watching guests appreciate my food as they eat, and a sort of secret glee that I’m serving something that’s probably healthier than anything they’ve had in a long time.

I see hosting visitors or bringing a dish to pass as a challenge: how can I make something people will truly enjoy, that has either a hidden or overt powerful nutritive boost, and that is frugal enough that I don’t mind sharing, even if by chance no one appreciates the effort?

A dip is the perfect grab and go dish for a big gathering, in my opinion. People love to be able to cruise the appetizer table, grab a cracker or veggie, dunk, and be on their merry way.

This one fits into this week’s theme of Fighting Germs Naturally perfectly with its fresh garlic. More on garlic tomorrow!

Recipe: Sweet Potato Garlic Spread

With a gorgeous autumn orange offset by the deep green of fresh parsley, this simple, nourishing spread has everything going for it: seasonality, aesthetics, quick prep, and even an immunity boost for the folks rubbing shoulders while they sample your real food appetizer. I serve it with homemade sourdough crackers, but it’s even better with my other homemade cracker recipe that tastes just like Wheat Thins.

Ingredients:

3 small or 2 large sweet potatoes (~4 cups)
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp oregano
1 Tbs chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Why yes…there are four garlic cloves in this photo. It was zangy, with emphasis on the ZANG!

Method:

Bake sweet potatoes until soft. I like to simply scrub the skins, place the whole potatoes on a cookie sheet or baking dish, and bake along with another meal I’m making sometimes a day or two before I need to make the appetizer recipe. If baking alone, 400F for 45-60 minutes should do the trick, depending on the size of your sweet potatoes. Cool completely, then peel and place into a medium bowl.

Mash somehow or another: a hand blender is my favorite, but you could use a food processor, a potato masher or even a sturdy fork.

Optional step: sauté the garlic in the olive oil over low heat until aromatic. I usually choose to skip this step and just go with fresh for the immunity-boosting properties of raw garlic.

Add garlic, oil, and all the other ingredients to the mashed sweet potatoes and mix until uniform. You can adjust the garlic to taste: more for adults who love it and less for children. Keep in mind that the intensity of the garlic will increase quite a bit, even if the spread only has to wait in the refrigerator one night. I like to add a bit extra lemon juice, because that zing gives the whole dish something special to talk about.

Tip: Plan to make homemade chicken stock the same week you need to take this dip somewhere so that you can buy one bunch of fresh parsley without waste.

You can serve the sweet potato spread with crackers of any kind (I’d recommend Wheat Thins if you’re going with purchased crackers; the sweetness is actually just perfect to compliment the garlic). Other tasty options include tortilla chips, toasted pita chips, mini bagels, or even fresh vegetables. It’s especially attractive on cauliflower florets.

My son requested that I made the homemade crackers and this dip for the teachers at his school when they had to stay late for parent-teacher conferences. I just love that it seems par for the course for him to expect his mom to make homemade crackers to share, and that he thought others would love them (they did!).

Sneak Preview!

I’m pretty excited to be the star of the November thank-you video for those who make a payment of any amount for their participation in the GNOWFGLINS eCourses. I’m sharing this garlic sweet potato spread and another appetizer, a tangy avocado dip:

One of its ingredients is yogurt cheese (or goat cheese if you’re not feeling frugal), so there’s also a bonus video demonstrating how I make yogurt cheese and whey.

I admit that the avocado dip went over much better with the teachers, but I (ahem) kind of forgot that the garlic would intensify so much in the sweet potato dip. Perhaps they were afraid they’d knock out the parents with their garlic breath!

Both the Fundamentals and Sourdough eCourses have ongoing enrollment, and the Pay What You Can paradigm has the added benefit of allowing you to choose those classes that interest you the most and skipping others you don’t have time for without feeling like you’ve wasted a registration fee.  If you’re curious to see two teachers make homemade sourdough crackers so you can serve them with this lovely sweet potato spread, click HERE and check out lesson 12 in the sourdough eCourse.

The gift for this month is definitely a frugal gem: Wardeh demonstrates how to make homemade soap in the crockpot. Make a payment now to receive it, then again anytime in November to get my holiday appetizer videos.

Also at KS this week:

Three giveaways:

1. In the Kitchen: Real Food Basics by Kate Tietje, ends 10/26.
2. 20 WINNERS for Green Pasture Fermented Cod Liver Oil, ends 10/29.
3. Herbal Nurturing eBook by Michele Augur, ends 10/31.
4. Some crazy grassfed vs. grainfed and what the heck should we feed animals dialogue in the comments of this post. Are you in favor of big farms feeding more or smaller farms with down-to-earth practices?

Whole Foods for the Holidays Carnival Linky: ENTER HERE

I’m so pleased to play hostess for this week’s real food progressive dinner. Please see the full list of participants and upcoming themes HERE. You can also still link up a soup post in last week’s carnival (Mine = black bean soup). All the linkys will remain open until the end of the meal, when we will choose some of our favorites and highlight your recipes in a wrap-up post.

Feel free to link up new or old recipes, as long as they are within the scope of “real food” – you can pronounce all the ingredients and make it within your own home. Better yet if the ingredients are all healthy or traditionally prepared, but we understand the value of baby steps!

Etiquette for linking:

1. This linky allows you to link to your homepage AND the permalink for your carnival post.  Be sure to leave a permalink, along with a little description.

2. Please link back to this post. If you choose an old recipe, it would be lovely if you mentioned the progressive dinner in a current post to share the fun with your readers. You can copy this line into a blog editor if you’d like:

Find other real food appetizer recipes at Whole Foods for the Holidays: A Real Food Progressive Dinner, hosted by Kitchen Stewardship this week.

3. If you refresh the page to see new entries, click “cancel” when a box asks you to resend information, or else your entry will come through twice.

[kslinky id="12" closed="true"]

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Keep up with KS for recipes, research, real life tips and more!  Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter, get KS for Kindle, or see my Facebook Fan Page.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money.  If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Disclosure: I am a teacher for the GNOWFGLINS eCourses and also share in the payments from my own readers. Thank you always for making a payment, but know that we truly mean “pay what you can” according to your means.

I’m also popping into some other recipe carnivals today: Tempt my Tummy Tuesday and Tasty Tuesday, and definitely the Ultimate Recipe Swap on “food you can pack to share” and “Appetizers” at Life as MOM.