Sweet Potato Skins

Tonight my family was all going out, and Marky and I were stuck home.  While I was disappointed not to get to go out to eat and to see Linny, I was excited to be able to choose a dinner menu with Mark that does not have the constraints that my meals usually have.  For example: Kenzie will not eat ham.  Rachael won't even come in the house if she smells fish.  My mother hates "bread with flavor."  Nick refuses to eat vegetables.  Do you see what I am dealing with here!?  Add to the mix the fact that I am practically a vegetarian again, and you have  quite the tough crowd.

But for tonight, it was just me and Mark.  We have pretty similar tastes and he is a great sport about eating whatever bizarre things I come up with.  I decided to go healthy again (two nights in a row!  Am I skinny yet?) with a recipe from the same blog as yesterday's pumpkin pasta.  This recipe I had pinned months ago, but I knew it was not for a night when there were carnivorous family members to feed.  But tonight was the night: stuffed sweet potatoes! Stuffed with spinach and chick peas!!!  Meatless!  And low fat!  Bring it on!

Being unable to leave the house, I sent Mark to Vincent's for what we needed.  They didn't have shallots, so I used garlic to saute the spinach with.  Other than that, we kept the recipe pretty similar.  Our sweet potatoes were huge and took forever to bake, and it was a bit difficult to scrape the insides out while leaving enough behind to hold the skins together.  In fact, out of our 4 halves, one half ended up getting scraped out completey (I love my sous chef but his ADD sometimes affects his direction-following skills!)  It worked out; we just had extra filling. 

I am a little bit in love with these (I know I said that last night about the healthy pasta, and now I love the healthy potato skins... perhaps this is the start of something beautiful).  The filling is soooo delicious and does not at all taste low fat.  The low fat cream cheese and sour cream get mashed with the potato, and then mixed with the spinach, chick peas, and garlic.  Absolutely amazing.  Then they get sprinkled with a little bit of mozzarella and baked for 10 minutes.  They are really filling; I couldn't even finish mine (though to be honest I had already eaten an embarrassing amount of the mashed potatoes while stuffing the potato skins).  There is one half left for lunch tomorrow.  Mmmmmmm!   Healthy sweet potato skins... they totally make up for a night stuck at home :)

Recipe:
healthy sweet potato skins