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This showstopping dish is over the top delicious, starring sweet potato, goat cheese, and black lentils, mixed with fresh herbs and twice baked in the oven.
Each year Alex and I have a little Thanksgiving tradition: we create and share a vegan and vegetarian Thanksgiving menu to show that the holiday can be about colorful, healthy eating instead of stuffing ourselves with rich foods. Usually it’s a vegetarian main dish. It’s a fun challenge to come up with something other than turkey and pumpkin pie, and each year the dishes get even tastier. This year, this sweet potato, goat cheese and lentil main dish was the star of the show. It’s gooey, creamy, crispy, fresh, and earthy all at once. Keep reading for the recipe.
Related: 15 Best Lentil Recipes | How to Cook Lentils
How to make this sweet potato goat cheese recipe
Our pick for a vegetarian fall meal is this lentil stuffed sweet potatoes with goat cheese. With no exaggeration, it’s one of my favorite recipes we’ve made this year. I modeled it off of these potato skins with pinto beans, but used lentils and goat cheese for a more refined wintery vibe. The goat cheese is not only crumbled over the top with black lentils, fresh thyme, and crunchy celery leaves, but it’s mixed into the inside of the sweet potato for a creamy, savory filling.
Here we’ve used a twice baked sweet potato concept. You bake the sweet potato until tender, then remove most of the flesh and leave the skins on the baking sheet. You mash the insides of the sweet potato, add goat cheese and seasonings, and stir until a creamy filling forms. Then you put it back into the potato skin and bake it again (twice!) for a shorter bake until everything is nice and warmed through. Top with those herbed lentils and a few more goat cheese crumbles, and you’ve got an irresistibly delicious meal. It works as a vegetarian main dish, a Thanksgiving side dish, or even for Christmas dinner.
This sweet potato goat cheese recipe takes about 1 ½ hours to prepare, making it fit for special occasions. However, it is well worth it for the flavorful dish that results. And, leftovers save well refrigerated; you can bake them to reheat! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Related: Best Goat Cheese Recipes
More sweet potato recipes
Outside of this sweet potato goat cheese recipe, here are a few of our favorite sweet potato recipes:
- Instant Pot Thai Style Sweet Potatoes
- Sweet Potato Wedges
- How to Cook Sweet Potatoes in an Instant Pot
- Moroccan Sweet Potatoes with Tahini Dressing
- Broccoli Cheese Stuffed Sweet Potatoes
- Moroccan Stew with Chickpeas & Sweet Potatoes
- Mexican Loaded Sweet Potato Fries
- All-Star Vegetarian Sweet Potato Chili
- Vegan Sweet Potato Soup with Harissa
This sweet potato goat cheese recipe is…
Vegetarian and gluten free.
Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese
This showstopping dish is over the top delicious, starring sweet potato, goat cheese, and black lentils, mixed with fresh herbs and twice baked in the oven.
- Prep Time: 20 minutes
- Cook Time: 1 hour
- Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
- Yield: 4 to 6 1x
- Category: Main Dish
- Method: Baked
- Cuisine: American
Ingredients
- 4 medium sweet potatoes (2 ½ pounds)
- ¾ cup black lentils (or French lentils)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
- 2 stalks celery, including leaves
- 1 large green onion
- 4 ounces goat cheese, divided
- 1 teaspoon fresh thyme, chopped
- Fresh ground black pepper
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 450°F.
- Wash the sweet potatoes, and prick them all over with a fork. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the size of the sweet potatoes, until tender.
- In a medium pot, combine ¾ cups black lentils with 3 cups water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes, until tender but not soft. Drain in a colander, removing as much liquid as possible, then transfer to a bowl. Mix lentils with 1 tablespoon olive oil and ½ teaspoon kosher salt. Thinly slice celery stalks and green onion and chop 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, then mix in with the lentils. Reserve the celery leaves.
- When the potatoes have finished baking, remove them from the oven. Transfer to a cutting board and let cool slightly until able to handle. Cut each potato in half with a serrated knife, then scoop out the insides into a bowl, making sure to keep a layer of sweet potato within the skin so that it can stand on its own. In the bowl, mash the potato with a masher, then stir in half of the goat cheese, ½ teaspoon kosher salt, and fresh ground pepper.
- Fill each potato skin with the potato filling and top with the lentils. Bake until heated through, 5 to 10 minutes. Remove the potatoes from the oven and garnish with celery leaves and the crumbles of the remaining goat cheese. Serve hot.
This is really good! I will boil the lentils for five or ten minutes longer next time. I left out the goat cheese so it would be vegan.
Delicious!
I was super inspired by this recipe! I ended up turning it into a mashed sweet potato bake (mainly because I ripped the potatoes far beyond recovery when scooping the insides out) and then served it along side cayenne pepper topped lentils . I also swapped the celery for caramelized onions (my husband and I aren’t fans of cooked celery, I’m sorry Alex.) It was literally to die for. Thank you so much for the inspiration! I would never have thought to mix goat cheese with sweet potatoes.
This sounds fantastic — I love all your twists on it! So glad that it was a hit. Thank you so much for letting us know! (And haha about celery!)
These look fantastic! Thank you for featuring veg Thanksgiving ideas! I’m looking for fun ideas for a couple of guests this year and it’s so helpful to have a bunch of great-looking ideas in one place.
All the menus please! I love your recipes, and definitely need to add some new ones to my list.