Potato, My Sweet

In an effort to use up our veg in interesting and delicious ways, as well as add to our paltry stock of kitchen items, Guy and I decided to eat our way through the Good Eats series. We'll learn about our food, try the recipes hands on, and have help buying those kitchen appliances and utensils that we so badly need.

Our CSA haul last week included four pounds of sweet potatoes, so we decided to start with "Potato, My Sweet" (Season 7, Episode 11). In this episode, Alton makes chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato waffles, and (oh my!) sweet potato pie. He also talks about choosing a waffle iron. We already have a good enough waffle iron (plastic and square and without any of the functions Q suggests, but it works for us). What we did need was a steamer basket (we thought ours was lost to the moving gods) and a potato masher. We got ours at Target for about 13$ total.

We jumped right in to the sweet potato waffle recipe and, of course, we served it up with delicious pan-fried chicken. Guy made the waffles and I made the chicken.

All told it took us approximately 30 minutes and every bite of it was fantastic. A few days later I saw this post on Serious Eats and now we want to try those waffles with some leftover turkey and a cranberry chutney. OMnom.

The next day we made the chipotle mashed sweet potatoes.

I used about half a can of chipotle instead of just one pepper because we love it hot (we are Texans after all). Next time I'll use the whole can. My only concern is that the adobo sauce might overpower the sweet potato flavor, but I'm going to give a try and see what happens. We served it up with blackeyed peas stewed with greens and a good chunk of steak. So good.

Sweet potato pie was our last recipe to try. Even though it wasn't in the recipe, our pie was served with Cool Whip. We enjoyed it and so did our friends who ate the leftovers. However, I

want to try this filling with bourbon added (like this recipe) and in the gingersnap pecan crust that this recipe uses.

Overall results: "Potato, my Sweet" was a win. My favorite recipe was the chipotle mashed sweet potatoes. Guy can't decide between them. The mashed potatoes are the most practical recipe, one we can whip up really quick and will probably use often. But the pie was delicious! And so were the waffles! He wouldn't want to make the waffles in the morning though; it's more of an afternoon chicken-and-waffles thing.