Roasted Five-Spice Sweet Potatoes & Apples

Add just a touch of our Penang-style Chinese Five Spice to your favorite fall inspired dishes to impart a complex flavor that will tingle your taste buds with some familiar spices, and a few that will delightfully surprise you.
In addition to the basic five-spice ingredients like star anise, cinnamon, and fennel, we also blend in sweet, warming spices like nutmeg, orange peel, coriander, and cardamom. All the elements to take your fall dishes to another level. Think apple butter, toasted walnuts and cashews, mixed berry compote, pumpkin soup, ginger snaps, or pecan pie.
Or simply for spicing up roasted vegetables and fruits like butternut squash, pumpkin, apples, and pears. My kitchen counter was getting crowded with Autumn Blush apples* and orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, so I chopped them up, mixed them up, spiced them up, and enjoyed this side dish of Roasted Five-Spice Sweet Potatoes & Apples.

For this Roasted Five-Spice Sweet Potatoes & Apples recipe, I coated the apples and potatoes with melted butter, olive oil, maple syrup, and a sprinkling of Penang Chinese Five Spice. Then I scattered in fresh rosemary sprigs to infuse that warming, pine-like aroma that pairs so well with five-spice.

Roast in the oven until golden, and then enjoy as a side with pork chops, or rotisserie, roasted, or pan fried chicken. It also makes a great addition to a fall-inspired vegetarian spread along with a hearty green salad or a homemade tomato soup.

Roasted Five-Spice Sweet Potatoes & Apples
by Season with Spice
Serves 3-4 as a side

Ingredients:
3 medium (about 1.5 lb) orange-fleshed sweet potato – peeled, halved, then cut crosswise into 2-inch pieces
2 sweet apples* – cored and cut into wedges
1 yellow onion – halved and sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp melted butter
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp of Season with Spice’s Penang-style Chinese Five Spice
2 tbsp fresh thyme – chopped
Sea salt, to taste (try our Sweet Ginger Sea Salt, or Sichuan Pepper Sea Salt)

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 425°F.
2. In a large bowl, toss the sweet potatoes, apples, and yellow onion with a mix of melted butter, olive oil, maple syrup and Penang-style Chinese Five Spice.
3. On a large roasting pan, spread the vegetables in a single layer. Scatter the chopped rosemary over and between the vegetables. Place in oven and roast for about 20 minutes. Gently flip the vegetables over and roast for another 15-20 minutes, or until nicely golden and tender. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt, and serve hot.

Note:
*I used Autumn Blush apples from Fairhaven Farm – one of the most beautiful farms in our area. The apples are yellow, with a nice sweet, crunch, and are very low in acid, so they are perfect at the end of apple season when your teeth and tummy can’t handle the other varieties of orchard apples any more. Try the Autumn Blush in this recipe, or if you don’t have access to these apples, Fuji apples will work fine too.