Sweet Potato Biscuits, Baked Zucchini and a Beet, Avocado and Apple Salad

Well, since I haven't had much of an opportunity to cook this week, I knew that tonight I had to make dinner using several of my veggies.  I've heard about sweet potato biscuits quite a bit lately but have never tried them, so I decided to make my own.  I made a simple biscuit mix using self-rising flour, butter, milk, shortening and added some cinnamon and allspice.  To this mixture I added some mashed sweet potatoes and mixed just until blended.  I formed biscuits after kneading just a bit and baked for about 15 minutes.

For the baked, stuffed zucchini, I first split the zucchini in half and boiled it just until tender and let cool.  In the meantime, I mixed cream cheese, sour cream, chopped crimini mushrooms, shredded gouda, aged cheddar and garlic together in a bowl.  When the zucchini was cooled, I scooped out the seeds and filled with the cream cheese mixture and sprinkled with paprika. The zucchini baked in the oven for 15 minutes just until the cream cheese was warmed through.

I'm most excited about my beet salad.  I found a suggestion online to place the beets in a bowl with 1/4 cup of water and bake, covered, in the oven for an hour.  I've never heard of that before, but decided to give it a try.  While the beets were baking I made an apple cider vinaigrette from, apple cider, white wine vinegar, mustard, oil, salt and celery seed. I also sliced the apples, onions and avocado, thinly.  At the last minute I decided to segment a blood orange and add that to the mix.  When the beets were done, I peeled and sliced them and added them to the vinaigrette to marinate for about 20 minutes.  To assemble the salad, I put a layer of spinach down on a plate, and topped with layers of the beet, apple, onion, avocado and blood orange.  To finish the salad I drizzled a bit more of the vinaigrette on top.

I have to say that dinner tonight was very light, refreshing and tasty!  The word that was used to describe tonight's meal was "superb" which made me feel pretty good.  The sweet potato biscuits were probably the best biscuits that I've ever had.  Light and buttery with a sweet flavor, resembling more of a fluffy cookie than a biscuit.  They went extremely well with the salad, which had several different flavor combinations going on, a little sweet and slightly spicy, turned out quite good.  The beets had a wonderful flavor and went very well with the vinaigrette.  I love the pinkish hue that it turned my salad!  I have to say that the zucchini was probably the biggest hit though.  It was very garlicky, but that didn't seem to bother anyone at all, since we all love garlic. Also, I'm a huge fan of just about anything with a cream cheese filling, so I was quite happy with this dish.  Needless to say, I really don't have any leftovers and my fridge is now ready for my new bin tomorrow.