Chilli wild garlic prawns with roasted sweet potato & spinach salad
Working wild food into quick ‘n’ easy midweek dinners – just 20 minutes from door to table!
Adding a little wild food to your diet is a great way to increase plant diversity, the single greatest determinant of gut health.[1] And you don’t get much easier or speedier than this, ready inside 20 minutes, the time it takes to scrub, cube, and roast a sweet potato!
Quick, simple, seasonal, feel-good food, packed with fresh flavours, it’s also perfectly balanced containing a mix of high-fibre, slow-release carbs, healthy fats, and protein. Fibres, fat and protein all slow digestion, so this dinner will balance your blood sugar, keep you feeling full for the rest of the evening, aiding weight loss, and avoid any bedtime blood sugar spikes and subsequent lows, which can wake you up during the night (sleep maintenance insomnia, the type where you wake up a few hours after falling asleep).
Thinking of optimising your health with your diet?
What’s great about it
One serving contains:
A whopping 4.9 of your ≥5-A-DAY!
Over a third of your recommended daily intake of fibre (11g of 30g)
A quarter of your recommended weekly fish intake (at least 2 portions of fish a week, a portion being 140g cooked)
Over a fifth of your weekly plant target (30+ different plants a week).
Trading sweet potatoes for white from time to time is a really simple, tasty way to up your fruit and veg and fibre intakes and maintain great blood sugar control – sweet potatoes count as one of your ≥5-A-DAY, white potatoes don’t; they’re also higher in fibre and lower in starch than white potato.
The bright colours (orange and green) indicate antioxidant and anti-inflammatory phytochemicals, bioactive plant chemicals that give plant-based foods and beverages their colour and protect us from chronic disease. Every colour has different health benefits, hence the advice to ‘eat the rainbow’. To make a cinch out of eating the rainbow, check out my Top 10 Tips to Eat the Rainbow & Why.
In peak season
When UK-grown produce is at its best and most widely available:
Wild garlic: March-June
Spinach: May-October
Sweet potatoes: October-March.
How many of your ≥5-A-Day: 4.9 per serving
Plant points: 6.5
Time
Prep: 5 minutes, almost all of which is done during the cooking time
Cooking: 16 minutes
Ingredients (per person, multiply up as required)
Salad:
350g/2 small or 1 large organic sweet potato
15g/1 tablespoon organic avocado oil or other heat-tolerant fat
Pinch dried harissa, two pinches if you like it hot
1-2 handfuls organic spinach leaves/salad leaves of your choice
Pink Himalayan or sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Nigella seeds
Dressing:
5g/1 teaspoon organic extra virgin olive oil
½ organic lemon, juiced and zested (5g/1 teaspoon of the juice for the dressing, the rest for the prawns)*
½ teaspoon organic Dijon mustard
Prawns:
75g/½ pack cooked organic king prawns (or other protein of choice)
1 green chilli, deseeded and finely diced
10g/knob grass-fed cultured butter
5g/small handful wild garlic leaves
1 dessertspoon organic lemon juice
Pinch or two of the organic lemon zest*
*Do go organic as lemons are on the PAN UK Dirty Dozen list despite their thick peels.
Method
Preheat the oven to 200C.
Scrub the sweet potato, cut into 2cm cubes and place in an ovenproof dish. Add the avocado oil, harissa, season with salt and pepper and toss to coat evenly. Roast for 15 minutes.
Meantime, butterfly the prawns: run a sharp knife down the back of each one, from head to tail. Deseed and finely dice the green chilli. Wash, shake dry and finely chop the wild garlic. Zest and juice the lemon. And make the dressing: place the olive oil, lemon juice and Dijon mustard in a large salad bowl and mix to a perfectly smooth emulsion.
Check the sweet potato at 15 minutes. It’s ready when soft through, caramelised and crispy at the edges. Give it a few extra minutes if required. Once ready, turn the oven off, but leave the roasted sweet inside with the oven door ajar.
Heat the butter in a small frying pan on a medium heat. Add the butterflied prawns, season with salt and pepper, and flip them over when the underside is golden – about 30 seconds. Add the chopped green chilli and continue to cook just long enough to colour the underside of the prawns.
Remove the pan from the heat, add the wild garlic and stir until just wilted. Add the dessertspoon of lemon juice and stir through.
Assemble the salad. Toss the roasted sweet potato and spinach leaves with the dressing and sprinkle with nigella seeds.
Plate the prawns, spooning over ALL those lip-smacking pan juices and sprinkle with the lemon zest. Add the salad on the side. Sit down and ENJOY! 👌😋😊
Recommended products & stockists
Look out for wild garlic when you’re out and about on walks, although avoid picking in areas used for dog-walking (💩🤢). You’ll also see it in a good many local shops – Roots, Fruits & Wholefoods and Locavorealways carry it, but it pops up in places you may not expect to find it, like the fridge of your local coffee shop for example. Keep your eyes peeled.
Bungay Butter – the best butter in the land and the UK’s only raw milk cultured butter. Made by Fen Farm Dairy in Suffolk, from their own herd of grass-fed, ancient-breed cows. Available locally from Mellis (£5.50/200g) and online from the dairy’s shop.
Isigny Ste-Mère Unpastuerised Salted Butter – the champagne of French butters. A raw milk cultured butter from grass-fed cows in the Isigny Ste-Mère PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) region of Normandy. Available from Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, £3.70/250g.
Serving suggestions
A complete meal in itself, this dish needs no accompaniment.
References
McDonald D, Hyde E, Debelius JW, et al 2018. American Gut: An Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research. American Society for Microbiology: mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18. Available from: DOI: 10.1128/mSystems.00031-18.