Curried Time: Sweet potato, tempeh, and fava beans coconut curry

Yesterday's review of our food spending budget made me realize that we eat too much of  "luxury" items. This includes fruits and veggies out of season, expensive meats and fish. We managed to get our cheese consumption under control now, which means big savings as cheese is very expensive in Canada.

I will be searching the aisles for healthier, cheaper, more basic alternatives. In each blog post I am going to point out cheaper alternatives to what I would had normally used.  

Cheaper alternative to canned coconut milk:

Instead of using caned coconut milk, which costs anything between $1.99 to $3.00 I used creamed coconut that you mix with hot water to get coconut milk. It costs $0.99 and it makes 500 ml of milk - great deal! It tastes a little different and is not as smooth but it worked well in this recipe an helped to make the sauce denser. Since I ended up with too much milk I made coconut ginger rice to go with this curry.

#easyfoodcreations, #vegan, #healthyeating

Preparation: 15 min

Cooking time: 60 min

Serves 5

Ingredients:
1 large sweet potato, diced

1 large onion, chopped

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1 T ginger root, grated

250 g tempeh, cut into cubes or strips

1T Soy sauce

150 g fava beans 

handful of cilantro leaves, chopped

250 g coconut milk

100 g tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes

2 T lemon juice

1 t cumin powder

1 t garam masala powder

0.5 t sambal oelek or 1 small Thai chilli 

Salt and pepper
water or coconut water

1. Blanch tempeh for about 5 minutes. Then dry it, and fry it with a little bit of oil until lightly brown. Set aside.
2. Saute onion, ginger, garlic and spices and sambal oelek, in 1T of oil for a few minutes. Add sweet potato and 0.5 c of water, let it cook for about 15 minutes on a low heat. Add beans, soy sauce and coconut milk and cook for another 15-20 minutes. Add tempeh for the final 15 min of cooking. Before serving mix in cilantro.
3. Serve with coconut ginger rice.
4. Enjoy!