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Home Plates: Spicy Sweet Potatoes and More
This is what happens when you write sweet potatoes on a shopping list, then hand that list to the person who has nicely agreed to go to the store:
You unpack the bags to find an assortment of orange, yellow and purplish tubers, then you choke a bit when you review the receipt. $1.99 a pound for colorful sweet potatoes? Are you kidding me? A $13 investment in tubers the other day scored me the orange sweet potatoes I’d wanted all along.
Certainly, it can be confusing to buy sweet potatoes. Sometimes the orange varieties are labeled yams, then you have to remember to tell the person shopping to buy yams. And what’s the deal with the reddish purple variety?
In fact, all three varieties are sweet potatoes, not yams. And the orange-fleshed sweet potatoes were so utterly addictive served up in Stephanie Chipman’s chili-roasted sweet potato wedge recipe the other night that I can almost forgive the outrageous price tag.
The potato wedges provided a sweet, yet slightly hot accompaniment to a grilled tri-tip on a Saturday night. They were really effortless. You cut a couple of sweet potatoes into eight lengthwise wedges, then halve the wedges and toss them with a mixture of olive oil, sugar, chili powder, coarse salt and ground pepper. Chipman places everything in a gallon bag, then gives it a few good shakes.
Her recipe calls for roasting the wedges for 15 to 20 minutes. Ours took a bit longer, closer to 30 minutes. It’s easy
to tinker with this recipe, increasing the heat a bit, cutting back on the sweetness or substituting — as we did — brown sugar, which added a nice caramelizing touch.
We loved the recipe so much that I’m ready to make them again, though this time I’ll write “orange sweet potatoes” on the grocery list. I’ll find another use for the yellow sweet potatoes, which don’t offer the same sweetness.
Request line
- Plates regular Susan Tajii is planning ahead. “I have a wonderful apricot tree and won’t be home when they are ready to be picked this summer,” she says. “Is it possible to pick the fruit, wash and freeze, then thaw later and make jam? I usually am able to make eight to 10 batches of jam each year.”
If you’ve had experience with freezing apricots and other fruits, then making jam, please share.
- My neighbor Peter — my generous apple-bearing benefactor — has a certain kind of apple dessert in mind. Peter is thinking there has to be a way to combine some of his favorite aspects of several apple desserts. His reasoning: Someone had to come up with a turducken, the quirky presentation of a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. Why not a dessert that somehow combines the doughy bottom crust and juicy filling of a pie, topped by a cake with a crunchy topping?
I’m thinking Peter might just need to settle for eating a couple of apple desserts at once, but perhaps one of you has a recipe for an apple dessert that meets at least some of his requests.
- Barry Gantt says he is “an Oaktown chestnut nut.” But he has a question about his beloved chestnuts. “One of my favorites this time of year is roasting chestnuts,” he says. “So, the perennial question is: How does one keep the fuzzy inner skin away from the nut itself?
“I recently boiled some chestnuts, then stuck ‘em under cold water right away — kind of like with hard-boiled eggs — but that didn’t solve the problem. Since I was a little guy, I’ve always liked chestnuts, but that inner lining problem has always had me stumped, and numerous searches online have turned up nothing.”
Gantt notes that a number of years ago Berkeley Bowl got in a shipment of little round chestnuts from China. These chestnuts peeled perfectly after roasting.
“Needless to say, I scarfed up as many of these as I could, fed some to friends, and so on, but alas, they disappeared and haven’t been seen since,” he says.
Contact Kim Boatman at [email protected]. Find recent Home Plates recipes online at www.mercurynews.com/home-plates.
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