Gluten Free: Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

We love a stuffed potato here at Sluttery HQ. We'll stuff a jacket potato with all kinds of simply wonderful things, from samosa to croque Monsieur. Hell, we'll even stuff a sweet potato!

Stuffed sweet potatoes are quite possibly my new favourite thing, and these ones are just as exciting cold as they are just out the oven. They're a great in-front-of-the-telly dinner, or feeding hungry crowds kind of a dish. Aside from the fact that they're a seriously low maintenance snack, the sweetness of the flesh lets you add extra spice through chilli cheese and hot peppers without it becoming overbearing.

Sweet potatoes are absolutely packed with beta-carotene, which is essential for cell growth and repair so they're basically a super food. If you've been recently diagnosed as wheat or gluten intolerant then your poor tum will need the extra love that sweet potatoes can help provide. It's also great for all you pregnant ladies, since it helps build your child-to-be's heart, lungs, kidneys, eyes and bones. Oh, and all you runners should note that sweet potatoes are brilliant when you're carb-loading. *Nutrition face*

Stuffed Sweet Potatoes (serves 2 for lunch or 4 as a snack)
You'll need:

• 4 medium sweet potatoes
• 4 thick cut rashers of smoked bacon
• 150g chilli cheddar, like Mexicana cheese (if you don't want too much spice, use regular cheddar)
• 5 sweet piquanté peppers (you can find these in jars, Peppadew are the most easy to find brand)

Make it!

• Preheat your oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.
• Scrub the skins of the sweet potatoes and cut each one in half lengthways.
• Sit the sweet potato halves on a baking tray, cut side down, and bake for about 30 minutes - they should be just soft enough to poke a knife in without meeting resistance.
• During the last 10 minutes of sweet potato baking, place the bacon slices on a baking tray and put in the oven to cook.
• Leave the sweet potatoes and bacon to cool a little.
• Cut the cheese, peppers and cooled bacon into 1/2 cm pieces and mix together.
• Scoop a few tablespoons of flesh out of each sweet potato half, leaving about a centimetre of flesh all around. I use the leftover flesh in soup, or add it to mashed potato.
• Fill the hollows with the cheese, peppers and bacon mixture and put it all back in the oven for 15 minutes. They're ready when they're bubbling and brown on top.
• Run out and buy all the sweet potatoes and eat them for every meal.

Sluttishly Simple: Papa D's Super Smashed-Up Spuds

To be perfectly honest I had never stuffed a potato until I met my old man (ooh, Matron!). Sure, I'd feasted upon spicy BBQ chicken wings and gobbled stuffed skins in the heady days of my youth; accompanied by jugs of weaker-than-weak cocktails and surrounded by uncoordinated salsa enthusiasts at what was then a must-be-seen hangout - Old Orleans (oh yes, the truth I tell ya!).

Anyway, now I am well sophisticated and all that, as I say I'd never made them myself.

My mister is (quietly) a little bit of culinary whizz - particularly when it comes to getting newly full-of-attitude pre-pre-teens to eat their dinners. So, when I started hanging about with him, I bore witness to a truly splendid thing. Pappa D's super smashed up spuds.

If you're anything of a cheese/carb/starch glutton (as I am) then you will adore these tasty yumsters.

You'll need (to feed 4 hungry mouths):

• 4 baking potatoes (the larger the better!)
• 1/2 Camembert (one of those that come in a swish french-style box)
• 100g grated cheddar cheese
• 2 rashers of bacon
• Fresh chive
• Salt and pepper

Make it!

• Bake your potatoes as normal in the oven at 190 degrees C for about 30 minutes - they don't have to be quite as cooked as normal as they'll go back in shortly.
• Once they are cooked get them out and let them cool enough to handle (if you're in a rush pop on an oven glove to handle them).
• Whilst you are waiting for them to cool, fry the bacon until it's nice and crispy.
• Once cooled, slice each potato in half using a cold metal kitchen knife (the cold metal helps slightly solidify the potato as you cut it and makes for a neater divide).
• Scoop out the potato from the skin and plonk it all in a nice big bowl - do not discard the skins!
• Chop up the Camembert and chive and add to the potato along with 3/4 of the cheddar, the bacon (finely diced)and a decent sprinkling of salt and pepper.
• Mash, mix and blend the ingredients together with a fork or other suitable mixing implement.
• Using a spoon, divide the potato mix between the skins.
• Top with the remaining cheddar and return to the oven for 10 minutes.
• Serve!