Quesadillas are an anytime meal. They take just 5 minutes to make, and everyone adores them. You can snack on them at a party, they make a late-home-from-work dinner, and they even work at breakfast.
Most places have started to stock chipotle paste these days, which has made its sweet smokiness more easy to come by. If you can’t get your hands on chipotle, ½ a teaspoon of hot smoked paprika will do.
Serves 2 as a dinner meal
Ingredients:
olive oil
1 sweet potato, peeled and grated
1 tablespoon maple syrup
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon chipotle paste 1 red chilli, finely chopped
1 × 400g tin of white beans, drained (I use haricots)
1 avocado
1⁄2 a lime
a few sprigs of fresh mint or coriander, leaves picked and chopped
4 corn tortillas
How to make it…
Heat a touch of olive oil in a pan, add the sweet potato and the maple syrup and season with salt and pepper. Add the chipotle paste and the chopped chilli and cook for a few minutes, until the potato has softened and lost its rawness.
Transfer to a bowl and add the beans, then use a potato masher to mash the whole lot up a little – you will still have some flecks of unmashed sweet potato. Season if needed. Mash the avocado with a little lime juice and stir in the herbs. I use the potato masher again here. Now heat a frying pan big enough for your tortillas. Lay a tortilla fat in the pan, spoon a quarter of the mixture on to one half of it, then fold over the other half. Dry fry on one side until it’s blistered and golden brown, then flip over and do the same on the other side. Keep the quesadilla warm while you do this with the rest of the tortillas.
Serve straight from the pan with the mashed avocado. Yum!
As part of a bigger meal:
• serve with a couple of handfuls of lemon-dressed salad leaves.
• serve with a crunchy salad of radishes, leaves, shaved fennel and coriander, and a quick tomato salsa.
Anna Jones is a chef, writer and author of ‘A Modern Way to Eat’ and ‘A Modern Way to Cook’ www.annajones.co.uk @we_are_food. Recipe developed for Shine for ShelterBox
