Celebrate Halloween by Eating Purple Potatoes
As I alluded in my Halloween post, I think Halloween is a great time to get adventurous with some new foods, especially brightly colored ones.
One of the best foods to do this with is purple potatoes! They cook up and taste very similar to white potatoes, yet they have 4x the antioxidants1, have been shown to reduce inflammation and lower the risk of heart disease2,3.
I spent some time racking my brain about the best way to turn these tasty taters into a ghoulish delight. While I did come across these purple potato vegan deviled “eggs”, I don’t really like to spend a lot of time on making things fancy or especially pretty. Frankly with 5 boys in the house I am looking for fast and easy over fun and fancy most of the time!
But after I brought home both some small fingering purple potatoes and several full size ones, ultimately I decided it was worth trying them out in my favorite classic potato recipes.
Roasted Purple Potatoes
I roasted the small potatoes, and decided to try this oil-free method at the same time. My transition to plant-based eating started with decreasing the oil and hasn’t been especially focused on being oil-free. I can tell that I feel better the less oil I eat however and am looking for ways to make it happen on a few old favorites such as roasted potatoes. My recommendation however is not to try two new things at once.
I believe that helping kids create a lifelong love of healthy foods is a lot like putting a frog in a pot of boiling water. If you toss a live frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump right out. But if you put him in cold water and slowly heat it up, you know what happens. I’m sorry to talk about cooking frogs on this plant-based blog, but you get the idea!
Too much change at once, and there’s a good chance your family will run away. But slowly help them adapt to better choices and they’re more likely to stick with it for the long-run. Of course every family is different and in cases of reversing chronic disease and other circumstances some people have great success changing everything overnight. But when not everyone shares your enthusiasm for a new way of eating, a gradual approach may be most successful
If you’re in the midst of trying to transition to more plants without the full enthusiasm of everyone who eats with you, make sure you check out Plant Strong Family Favorites. These are some of our favorite go-to recipes with lots of variations to make them work for any family.
Back to potatoes. Between you and me, I set some aside for me and then sprayed the remaining potatoes with a little spritz of avocado oil. I just knew that the color was going to be a big shock (my boys were already making comments) and that they needed to taste as familiar as possible. And sure enough, my boys all loved them and it was one of those glorious moments when the surprise is just oozing from their voice: “hey, these actually taste good!”
Green Soup
I thought a green soup would be the perfect complement. Unfortunately I went with one I found on Google instead of our old favorite Broccoli Soup. It can be made in only about 10 minutes, is a great source of healthy plant-based calcium, protein, and iron and it works well with Kale and other greens. And it’s a super satisfying soup that makes a great main dish!
The purple potatoes were renamed “witches candy” and the soup did not taste nearly good enough to be worth the time.
Plant-based Tin-Foil Dinners with Purple Potatoes
The next night was my preschoolers birthday. We’d decided to have a fire in our fire pit for his birthday, and I decided that tin foil dinners with purple potatoes would work out perfectly.
Years ago, before we went plant-based, we found a way to make tin-foil dinners that were cooked just right every time, even if you got into camp way too late to even have a fire. After years of tinfoil dinners that ended up with burned veggies and barely cooked meat, we decided we just needed to cook everything at home. It used to be costco meatballs with potatoes and carrots, now we like sloppy joe lentils.
Potatoes and carrots roasted in the oven are delicious and hold their shape nicely, but to be super quick I just tossed them in the Instant Pot. I cooked a mixture of purple potatoes, sweet potatoes, russet potatoes and carrots for 6 minutes which left them quite soft, I’d start with 3 or 4 minutes depending on how big your chunks are and cook a few extra minutes as needed. You can also leave them a bit firm 
and let them finish cooking on the fire but I like the cooking on the fire to require as little attention as possible–I’m busy enough making sure no one catches their clothes on fire!
After cooking the potatoes in the instant pot it’s a good idea to drain them in a strainer and allow them to dry before building your dinners.
The final piece of our perfect tin foil dinners is slice an onion into thinnish rounds. We then use the onions as the base, top with potatoes and carrots and finally the lentils. The onions provide a barrier to prevent burning and also provide good flavor whether you are an onion eater or not.
Use either one sheet of heavy duty foil or two sheets of regular.
More Purple Potato Options
I also don’t expect you would have any problems using purple potatoes for all or some of the potatoes called for in plant-based mashed potatoes or creamy potato soup. Let some purple potatoes hop in your cart this week and let me know how it goes!