By Kathy Hart
It’s sweet potato week at Isaac’s Café!
Life is sweet! It’s even sweeter when the Edible Garden gives Isaac’s café an abundance of sweet potatoes. We will be featuring these gems on our menu every day this week. There are so many ways to prepare sweet potatoes, there will be no shortage of tasty specials, soups and seasonal sides to have your taste buds singing the praises of this versatile and oh so sweet addition to our Isaac’s Café menu.
Here are some sweet tidbits about sweet potatoes:
- Sweet potatoes are the nutritious rock star of the root crops. They are a great source of Vitamins A, C and the B-complex vitamins as well as being low in sodium and it has zero fat.
- Christopher Columbus found that they were already being cultivated by the Native Americans and brought them back to Europe.
- Sweet potatoes come in a variety of colors from yellow to orange and purple, but the orange are the sweetest and contain the most beta-carotene.
- Already highly nutritious, they become even healthier when roasted with a bit of olive oil as this makes the beta-carotene, a fat-soluble nutrient, more bio-available.
- Sweet potatoes and yams are not the same. Yams tend to be much drier and contain more starch making sweet potatoes the nutritious winner of the two.
Now that you know just a bit more about sweet potatoes, come on out this week to Isaac’s Café and taste the many ways we find to tantalize your taste buds. Whether it’s our mashed rosemary sweet potatoes feature along with our Meatless Monday special of veggie pot pie and blackberry cobbler or as a sweet/hot soup, a smoked sweet potato salad or even sweet potato oven fries with honey dipping sauce, you’ll find them the perfect veggie to kick off the fall season.