I was wandering around the Chapters bookstore looking for a reference book I need for school and I couldn’t find it so the next best option was for me to purchase a new cookbook. This is how I happened to pick up the cookbook titled Thug Kitchen 101.

It is quite an entertaining cookbook of one pot meals, and plant-based, comfort food recipes. Their schtick for this cookbook is to use lots of foul language. They throw down the F bomb incessantly.
I realize that’s just their schtick, that they’re using foul language to create their brand. I actually found the swearing to be excessive, but the recipes and stories they tell are worth it. I suppose.

The first recipe that I decided to try from the Thug Kitchen 101 cookbook was their maple roasted sweet potatoes.
This dish was dead easy. Heat the oven to 450°, use a mandolin to slice a couple sweet potatoes or yams into approximately quarter inch thick slices and toss them with some maple syrup, grape seed oil, smoked paprika, chili powder, and salt.

They say to add the slices of sweet potatoes or yams into a 9″ x 13″ baking dish and then add the oil, maple syrup, and spices directly into the baking dish before tossing everything together to coat the slices of yam.
Instead, I mixed the maple syrup, grape seed oil, and spices together in a mixing bowl and then added the slices of yams to that. Then I put them into the baking dish.
Into the pre-heated oven for 25 minutes. When I took them out, they were spectacular. So spectacular that I immediately made another pan of them!

On the same evening I also made the curry roasted eggplant from the Thug Kitchen 101 cookbook . For this one you just slice six or eight Japanese style eggplants from end to end before coating them in a mixture of grapeseed or Safflower oil (the authors are totally against canola oil), curry powder, and salt.
You lay the sliced eggplants facedown in the baking dish and then put them in the oven for about 30 minutes.

I’ll be honest, mine didn’t look like the ones in the picture in the cookbook. They were tasty, but they were not outstanding. I will probably make this recipe again just to be sure, but it wasn’t a hit with my kids. (The true test).
I will continue to make recipes from this book and share my experiences with you here.