Recipe: Pickaninny Creole

--> “Serve with grilled bacon, ham or game.”—The Encyclopedia of Cooking Complete in 24 Volumes, Volume 13: 250 Ways of Serving Potatoes (1953) 

PICKANINNY CREOLE  

“Cut boiled sweet potatoes in halves lengthwise and arrange in a shallow pan. Cover with plenty of butter and brown sugar. Add a dash of mace, a sprinkle of salt and the grated rind of an orange. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F.) until the sugar and butter have formed a thick syrup, 30 to 45 minutes.”

Recipe: Sweet Potatoes with Sausage Patties

for the meatatarians at the tailgate

 

SWEET POTATOES WITH SAUSAGE PATTIES

Mashed sweet potatoes

Brown sugar

Sausage patties, pan-browned, drippings reserved (preferably from homemade sausage—see recipes in this and Tex-Czech sections)

Preheat oven to 350^o. Fill a deep buttered pie plate with mashed sweet potatoes, sprinkle potatoes lightly with brown sugar, cover with pan-browned sausage patties, adding a few teaspoons of drippings “for flavor.” Bake 15 to 20 minutes.

Recipe: Diner Candied Yams

for the vegetarians at the tailgate

The recipe in the Big Food Manual begins:

The dark, orange-fleshed variety of sweet potato commonly known as the yam has been a southern staple since colonial times, and candied yams have enjoyed wide popularity since the late 19^th century—especially at Thanksgiving. Try them alongside roast turkey [see recipes in Poultry section] with mashed potatoes [see recipes in Potatoes … section] and gravy [see recipes in Basics section].—Diane Rossen Worthington, Diner: The Best of Causal American Cooking (1995)

Recipe below

Baked Sweet Potatoes à la Roxie

I need to work on the color balance of this photo because the white sweet potatoes were a little whiter than they appear here.

The vegan side dish with tonight's oven fried chicken. Pulled the sweet taters out of the garden about 10 days ago. Washed them off. Pare boiled them for about 20 minutes. Stripped the peels off. Rolled them chopped pecans and doused them with a bit of sugar. Baked. 

Real recipe soon. I promise!

Sweet

A day late

and a thought short.

I was just thinking I should have ground up some Tabasco peppers & water and sprayed it on the sweet potatoes. Stupid deer.

Recipe: Bourbon Sweet Potatoes

Mr. Big Food made some modifications to this recipe as he was preparing the dish. The original recipe called for something like three cups of sugar-- for 4-5 sweet potatoes which, as the name implies, are already sweet! We also omitted the topping entirely. 

Delicious!

The recipe below includes the topping, but has been corrected-- do use one cup of sugar in the sweet potatoes. Although, if you're topping them, you could cut that back a bit.

Yesterday's mail

brought the sweet potato slips!

I've talked about this before but I'll recap here. The folks at one of my favorite seed companies, New Hope Seed Company just north of Memphis, work with a local sweet potato farmer to make slips available to New Hope customers. The slips are shipped, via USPS, to you when it's time to plant them in your area. Twelve slips cost $16.95. Plants are also available in quantities of 25, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 (for $174.50). 

Sweet potatoes are indestructible. These plants are sitting on the kitchen windowsill. I will get them in the ground this weekend, but if for some reason I weren't able, they would last for weeks just sitting here in an inch of water. Sure, some might not make it, but do you have any idea how many sweet potatoes 12 sweet potato slips will yield? 

Recipe: Sweet Potato Waffles II

"Chicken Casserole XXI" would not be particularly noteworthy in my book. But "Sweet Potato Waffles II" is really something to note, especially since we still have a small pile of sweet potatoes from last fall.

The recipe comes from 500 Delicious Dishes from Leftovers. Mr. Big Food is almost finished scouring this crappy old cookbook looking for new additions to The Big Food Manual. Volume 3 is cakes!

The recipe in Big Food begins, 

“Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and serve with roast duck or turkey.”—The Encyclopedia of Cooking Complete in 24 Volumes, Volume 2: 500 Delicious Dishes from Leftovers (1953)

Seed sale

I got an email from New Hope Seed Company. They are having a sale!

I will order Aunt Hatie's red okra, whippoorwill blackeyes (cowpeas = blackeyed peas), and the hardshell melon seeds. I'll also pre-order one of those sweet potatoes.

The red okra is delicious and beautiful. Okra is related to hollyhock, rose of Sharon, and hibiscus. The flowers are gorgeous. The plant gets about 3-4' or more tall. You could plant okra in the back of a flower bed!

Fresh blackeyes are so good. Once established, the plants take care of themselves.

We had that hardshell melon this year. It was very good, although to be honest, I like this French melon better. But the hardshell melon is more resistant to critters.

Last year was the first I'd grown sweet potatoes. I was pretty ignorant about them then. I now know that once you have a crop, you no longer need to buy slips. This year, I wasn't paying attention and both of the varieties I planted, Nancy Hall and O'Henry, were white potatoes. Very tasty but not traditional. So I'll get some orange for next year. Sweet potatoes are so easy it grow.

A word about the tobacco: Cool. I grew tobacco once. I was ticked off that the busybodies in the fairly good sized sort of mid-Western city in which we lived had decided in their infinite wisdom to prohibit smoking in bars and restaurants. I knew the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street belonged to the city (although I never saw anyone from the city mowing it). So I planted tobacco on city property. Take that! 

Tobacco is another plant that is beautiful as a plant, especially if you let it go to seed.

Sweet potatoes

O'Henry sweet potatoes

Today is the day! Not that there's anything special about today, but today is the day I decided to dig up the sweet potatoes. And of course, today is the day I didn't look at the radar. We've already had two or three downpours. Not the best weather for pulling sweet potatoes which need to cure in the sun for a day or two. Oh well.

O'Henry sweet potato

has a different look from the other darker-skin varieties. It is a white-skinned, cream-fleshed sweet potato that cooks up drier than other sweet potato varieties. O'Henry's leaves are green and heart shaped. It's large tubers grow in a compact cluster underneath the plant helping to make harvesting easier. O'Henry has a high yield potential and also stores well. Excellent taste.

I don't know yet about storage, but everything else is true. There are about half as many again still in the ground, so I'd call that a high yield.

This year, I planted my slips-- I think about eight or nine of O'Henry-- in a rectangular planter in front of the house. We have two such planters; another variety is in the second. Sweet potato foliage is beautiful. Indeed, the sweet potato vine that folks plant as greenery in large planters really is a sweet potato-- same species, different variety. (Note to the prepper/survivalists out there, the tubers of the sweet potato vine, while not as large as a variety bred for eating, are edible.) I had several reasons in addition to appearance for planting them in planters. First, I hoped it would be much easier to harvest the potatoes. It is. Second, I hoped the deer wouldn't come so close to the house. They did. But another great thing about growing sweet potatoes is that even if deer strip the plants of almost all their foliage, it will grow back and the potatoes aren't affected.

Planting and growing sweet potatoes is remarkably easy.