Soft Landings: Sweet Potato and Whipped Feta

 🎓 1st Year PhD • 📘 History • 😵‍💫 Frazzled

During the early days of my PhD, this dish became a classic standby. In part, for the usual reasons of being relatively inexpensive, straightforward, and typically using up things I already had in my fridge: yoghurt from my morning breakfasts, bacon probably left over from weekend brunch. It also became part of my fortnightly recipe rotation because it was just so goddamn comforting. The potato tasting so sweet, the feta creamy and salty, with the onion and bacon further accenting both those flavours while adding the oh so necessary crunch, thereby saving it all from becoming baby food. 

I’ve described this take on the baked potato as a ‘Soft Landing’, and I really mean that. I’d usually end up having this early to mid-week because these were the days that I’d already feel so bogged down with the various challenges of my research and its accompanying existential angst, whilst hating that the weekend was still far away. I’d feel so frustrated, frazzled and sad that comfort food—which wasn’t as guilt-inducing as a fat bowl of pasta—was what I needed. Saying that, it is filling, mind you.

This is a dish that calls for a night in, with pyjamas, when you can pop on the oven ahead of time and calmly wait for the potato to thoroughly bake, only needing to finish up the toppings during the final 15 minutes of cooking time. Before that, I’d recommend using the baking time to pick out something uplifting yet slow-paced to watch (my recommendation: anything narrated by David Attenborough). Otherwise, any form of gentle pottering would be just the thing. 

A few notes on the recipe: 

Feel free to increase the amount of sweet potatoes (and in doing so, the topping ingredients) if you are cooking for other people, or want to make a packed lunch. Of course, if your potato is, contrary to the recipe, small or especially large, modify the topping ingredient amounts accordingly.

And yes, this does indeed use the whipped feta from A Welcome Interlude: Toast, Three Ways recipe. Sue me.

Servings: 1         🥖 GF

Time:
👐 Hands-on: 20 minutes
⏳ Hands-off: 45 minutes - 1 hour 15 minutes (depending on the size of the sweet potato)

Ingredients

• 1 large sweet potato

• 100g feta

• 100g Greek yoghurt (full fat yoghurt can also be used)

• 1 medium red onion

• 4 rashers streaky bacon

• A few glugs of olive oil,

• A few fat pinches of salt

• A good grinding of black pepper

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C (200°C fan) and line a baking tray with foil. Making sure your sweet potato has been scrubbed, stab all over with a fork before basting with a little olive oil and sprinkling with salt. Put into the oven for 45 minutes - 1 hour 15 minutes, turning over halfway during the cooking time. It should have no resistance when tested with a fork.

2. Roughly 15 minutes before the end of the potato’s cooking time, place a frying pan on medium heat and add the 4 rashers of bacon. Fry until thoroughly crispy and it has expelled plenty of fat.

3. While the bacon is cooking, slice the onion in half and then again in thin half moon rounds. 

4. Once the bacon is finished, remove from the frying pan and onto some kitchen paper. Then add the slices of onion to the pan. Using the bacon fat, fry the onion until they get soft and crispy. Adjust the heat if it starts to brown too quickly.

5. As the onions fry, decant the yoghurt into a large bowl and then crumble in the feta. To this, add a few grindings of black pepper and a couple of glugs of olive oil. Now whip altogether with a fork until it is mostly smooth—it won’t completely lose its graininess. Taste and add more pepper or olive oil as desired.

6. Once the potato is baked, give it a moment to rest and then open up, slathering the insides with the whipped feta, followed by the sweet potato and bacon.

Storage

Best eaten immediately. However, the potato and individual toppings will keep separately in the fridge for a few days.