Sweet Potato Toast with Spinach & Poached Eggs

This recipe was developed as part of a partnership between Bariatric Foodie and Celebrate Vitamins. Here on Bariatric Foodie you’ll find pictures and helpful recipe hints, then use the button at the bottom of this post to click through to the Celebrate Vitamins website to view and download the recipe, complete with nutrition information!

Before anyone balks, this idea was co-signed by a bariatric dietician.

Side note: I always get slightly salty about having to use that disclaimer but when you’ve been in bariatric food blogging as long as I have, you sort of pick up on what reaction you are likely to get from folks. Sadly, for many of us, all carbs are bad carbs and me suggesting eating any carbs seems sacrilege.

So. I just thought I’d start out by giving this particular recipe a little street cred. Not all carbs are created equal(ly)!

This recipe was yet another inspiration from my attendance of the OAC “Your Weight Matters” Convention, where I got to hear from Dawn Jackson Blatner (who is a dietician who has also appeared on the show “My Diet is Better Than Yours”), along with Cassie Story, of WLS Daily Plate. (By the way if you don’t follow her site…YOU SHOULD! OMIGOSH the food there looks so good. That’s one site I frequent when I need a new recipe idea!)

I think the sweet potato toast idea was Dawn’s, but it was emphatically co-signed by Cassie. Now to be completely honest, my reaction to the whole notion of sweet potato toast can be summed up with one word.

HUH???

Sweet potato toast? In my head this conversation was reminiscent of that whole exchange I had with PF Chang’s staff over jicama tacos. I was a bit confused. Were we talking about baking sweet potatoes out of bread? No, I learned. We were not. We were actually talking about making slices of sweet potato into toast.

So my second thought was: that’s a little weird.

But here’s the thing with me. Weird = good. Sorta. It means I’m intrigued. And when I’m intrigued, I play with my food!

So the main purpose of this post is to give you some solid tips with regards to making sweet potato toast. Because, as per usual, I got a whole education about this in my attempts to do it!

Tip #1: If you’ve got it (it = a toaster oven), use it!

I have a conventional toaster. Mind you, it’s a very nice, six-slice toaster but a conventional toaster nonetheless. That was problematic for a few reasons.

1. Unless I got a BAZOOKA big sweet potato, the slices fell down in the toaster and were hard to fish out. I have this pervasive belief that sticking anything in the toaster to fish things out (even something that does not conduct electricity) will result in electrocution.
2. It took a cabillionty seven times of pressing down the toaster oven button for it to reach any sort of palatable texture.
3. And even then, by the sweet potato cooked the outside of it was kind of dry, making it look like a zombie potato, which brings me to my next point.

Tip #2: Oil is your friend

“But Nik, how do you use oil in the toaster???” See? That was another problem. So my second go-round with this (I threw out the first), I sprayed non-stick cooking spray (canola) on both sides. I managed to get the sweet potato toasted and it was a nice consistency.

And after the fire department left from the call my smoke detector made to it, it was even tasty!

Yeah, so this sort of underscores the toaster oven tip. It’s much easier to toast something with oil in a toaster oven. I used a quick spray of non-stick cooking spray on either side, but you can use what you like.

#3 – For us regular toaster people, parchment paper can be our friend

So one might ask if I was so passionate about making sweet potato toast, how come I didn’t just go out and get a toaster oven? That would be a fair question. I actually don’t believe in buying countertop appliances for only one use but we all know toaster ovens can be used for many, many things.

I think because my last kitchen had severely limited counter space, I’m just very particular about buying new appliances. I mean…I don’t even own a stand mixer, folks. So a toaster oven is low on my priority list.

But I was not to be deterred from making sweet potato toast! I saw on Facebook that a friend of mine (let’s call her Pam) posted these little sleeves you can use to make grilled cheese in a toaster (brilliant, by the way). So I decided to see if that would work for sweet potato toast. It did! The toast cooked nicely and I was able to extract it without burning my fingers.

However.

You have to be very careful about the setting on your toaster. Parchment is paper. And paper is made out of trees. When trees come into contact with extreme heat they burn! Thankfully I learned pretty quickly to use a nice, middle-of-the road toaster setting and while my parchment was very brown at the end of it all, I didn’t catch anything on fire!

So how many times did I toast the sweet potatoes?

On average, I gave it 4-5 goes. Here’s how each go went for me:

• First go, sweet potato starts to shrivel a little but is still pretty hard.
• Second go, it’s softened just a teeny bit but you can tell it is in no way cooked.
• Third go, the color starts to deepen and you may get some browning happening
• Fourth go, color gets deeper, browner. It’s way softer but just shy of being soft enough to take a safe bite
• Fifth go (provided your toaster isn’t smoking) it may have a few dark spots on the outside, but it’s soft and can be easily pierced by a fork.

From here you can do a lot of things with it. I didn’t find this to be a great toast sub mainly because it softens up on you a good deal after you toast it. Plus any water in the air is going to condense and that will contribute to it being sort of soft. So I didn’t try to do some of the ideas I’ve seen online about putting peanut butter on it (surprising for me, huh?). Instead, I went with my other criteria for deciding how to pair foods.

I went with what I thought would look pretty: beautiful veggies and a poached egg! (Note: I put poached eggs on nearly anything. It’s just…wonderful. But I know some of you can’t do poached eggs so if you can’t I apologize for the luscious picture I put up on this post!)

So to close this party out, I thought it might be nice to go over the nutrition we have going in this dish here. This is not an exhaustive list but we have:

• Vitamin A (lots and lots of vitamin A!)
• Calcium
• Iron
• Vitamin B-6
• Magnesium
• Vitamin D

I don’t want to make any false claims but…eating food like this could make you grow a cape and fly somewhere! 😉

Seriously though…this was an easy and yummy meal that I thoroughly enjoyed. You can save yourself a bit of time on future portions by making a bunch of sweet potato toast at one time and wrapping/freezing individually. From there you’d just pop in the toaster oven when you want to make it and voila! Big nutrition in a little package!

Gimme That Recipe!