AIP stuffed sweet potato skins with bacon, mushroom, and cilantro-coconut sauce

Football Sundays and holiday parties bring their own version of hard on this protocol: a table covered in chips, dip, and wings, with not one thing on it built for you. These skins fix that specific problem. Sweet potato stands in for the nightshade potato underneath it, the filling is bacon and mushroom, and a three-ingredient sauce does everything sour cream does without a trace of dairy in it. Bring the whole tray. Nobody needs to know it is also compliant.

Sweet potato is doing the vitamin A work here, linked to how your mucous membranes and immune system hold up over the long run, while the bacon and mushroom filling is your zinc source in this dish, tied to a well-regulated immune response and a gut lining that keeps repairing itself.

Look for bacon that is sugar-free and clean-label, and while it browns in the skillet, give half a second to where it came from, an animal that is feeding your whole table tonight. Set the tray down with some care, the orange of the skins against the green of the sauce, and let people actually gather around it instead of grabbing a piece and drifting back to the couch.

Ingredients

For the skins:

• 3 hand-length sweet potatoes
• 2 tbsp avocado oil
• 1/3 tsp sea salt

For the stuffing:

• 4 slices sugar-free, clean-label bacon
• 2 cups chopped mushrooms
• 1 cup chopped red onion
• Sea salt
• 1/2 avocado
• 2 scallions, sliced
• 1/3 cup chopped cilantro

For the sauce:

• 1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk
• 1/3 cup cilantro
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• Pinch of sea salt

Method

Heat the oven to 400 F. Bake the whole sweet potatoes 45 to 50 minutes, until they give when pressed. Meanwhile, crisp the bacon in a skillet, then cook the red onion and mushrooms in the bacon fat with a little salt until soft. Chop the bacon and combine it with the onions and mushrooms.

Halve the baked sweet potatoes and scoop out the flesh, leaving a 1/4-inch shell (save the flesh for another use). Brush the skins with avocado oil, sprinkle with salt, and raise the oven to 450 F. Bake the skins about 10 minutes per side, until the edges crisp.

Blend all the sauce ingredients about 20 seconds. Fold the avocado, scallions, and cilantro into the bacon-mushroom mixture, fill the crisped skins, and top with the cilantro-coconut sauce.

Make-ahead note

You can build everything except the avocado in advance; fold the avocado in just before serving so it does not brown. The cilantro-coconut sauce keeps about a week refrigerated and doubles as a dairy-free sour cream for other dishes. Parsley works in place of cilantro if you prefer.

Air fryer variation

You can crisp the scooped skins in the air fryer instead of the second oven bake. Bake the whole sweet potatoes in the oven as above, scoop and oil the skins, then air fry at 380 F for about 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges crisp, checking partway. Fill and sauce as written. This conversion is ARM-derived and untested, so verify it the first time.

*Adapted from asquirrelinthekitchen.com*