Soy Chai Vegan Sweet Potato Casserole
Desperate times call for desperate measures. But that's not always a bad thing. One of our best friends, Kanushri, is vegan, so we do a lot of vegan baking. Sweet potato casserole is an easy enough thing to make vegan, and it tastes just as good vegan as it does non-vegan. I had made vegan sweet potato casserole before, but on Sunday when I wanted to make it, I didn't have soy milk. I had literally just gone to the grocery store and didn't want to walk the mile there and back again, so I thought about my options. In the Munchie Mart in the basement of my dorm, they have 8 ounce juice-box sized things of chocolate soy milk, which I had used once before in sweet potato casserole. It turned out fine, but I didn't want to do that again because I didn't want to waste a meal or pay the ridiculous price they charge to get them individually. So, I decided to check some of the drugstores closer to campus to see if they had soy milk (in this adventure I probably ended up walking more than I would have had I just gone back to the grocery store). Well, none of them had soy milk.
Feeling defeated, I was on my way back to my dorm when I saw Starbucks and had an epiphany. I often get soy chai lattes at Starbucks (the best soy latte that you've ever had, for all you Train fans). And the spices in chai are similar to those in sweet potato casserole. So, I went into Starbucks, got a venti soy chai (8 ounces for this recipe, 12 ounces for me!), and a great new recipe was in the works.