Black Bean & Sweet Potato Enchiladas

Tonight's dinner was a strange-sounding recipe I found in my favorite vegetarian cookbook, The Vegetarian Mother's Cookbook: Black bean, sweet potato, and greens enchiladas. We like sweet potato quesadillas, so I thought I'd try this. We also eat a lot of beans (which we've done even before cutting out meat altogether) and black beans are our favorite. It's one of the quicker recipes I've made lately, taking only about an hour start to finish including baking time. You sautee onions, then add the cubed pieces of sweet potatoes, then add some chopped greens (I used spinach and kale). The recipe didn't call for corn, but I threw it in anyway to give us a good assortment of veggies. That was the filling. I made a homemade enchilada sauce with raw heavy cream from the dairy farm and pico de gallo. I used raw fresh colby cheese inside the enchiladas and over the top. (In fact, our dairy farm wins awards every year at the Illinois State Fair for its cheeses, and their colby is my favorite! The cheese we get from them is never any more than a couple of days old because of the demand it has!)

Complemented by a bed of homemade brown spanish rice, it was DELICIOUS. Pete wasn't home from work for dinner (working in 83-degree weather-ugh!), but the kids absolutely loved this. They ate more than I thought and I had to stop them to make sure we had enough left over for Pete!



In case some of you are noticing, we are enjoying the benefits of raw milk and cheeses from our local dairy farm. This is something friends of ours in Minnesota told us about. They had to go to Otsego every Tuesday morning to enjoy this. Why, some of you may ask, would you do that? Here's a good link:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/03/26/pasteurized-milk-part-one.aspx

Before we moved here, we were buying organic milk, which got really expensive. Even with that, Vince was still having daily lactose problems. Now I've learned that pasteurization of milk, whether organic or conventional, alters the lactose properties of milk. Since we've started drinking raw milk and eating raw cheeses, Vince has had complete elimination of lactose symptoms! We're also getting the good bacteria that comes with raw milk which is so important to healthy digestive function. In case you're interested, this link has some good links about how to find raw milk. Got (raw) milk?!