Accent

Sweet potatoes

Jane Poynter knows sweet potatoes. During the first of two years she and seven fellow ecological pioneers spent locked in a hermetically sealed Biosphere 2, the eight Biospherians ate 1.3 tons of them. That's 325 pounds of sweet potatoes each, or nearly a pound per person per day between fall 1991 and when they left in 1993. The crew members ate so many of the yellow-orange spuds that their own skin turned the yellow of a really bad fake tan, with bright orange calluses on their hands. In her memoir, "The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes in Biosphere 2," to be published next spring, Poynter recalls putting sweet potatoes in almost everything, from the filling for 6-inch-deep pies, to pizza sauce, to fancifully shaped empanadas they called "dinosaurs" - even using the pulp to bind together fat-free pastry dough and stretch cream cheese made from their limited supply of goat milk. Poynter spent so much time planting sweet potato cuttings, she once wound up in traction from a strained back. The amazing thing is that she still kind of likes them. Opening the refrigerator of her Tucson home, the 43-year-old Poynter whips out the remains of a jar of Young's Farm Sweet Potato Butter, from Dewey, Ariz. Husband Taber MacCallum, another Biosphere 2 veteran, has polished off most of it, but enough remains to taste its flavor, a cross between applesauce and sweet potato pie. "It's quite good," Poynter says. You don't have to be confined to a glass terrarium in Oracle - or even turn orange - to eat your fill of the much-maligned sweet potato. If you can suppress childhood memories of having to choke down sweet potato casseroles to get to the melted marshmallow topping, a whole world of sweet potato cookery opens up. Sure, there are some truly dreadful ideas out there - like sweet potato and marshmallow fritters rolled in cornflakes - but there are also crisply sweet yam chips and fries, tasty sweet potatoes simply baked or roasted, perhaps with a bit of a glaze, even that soul food favorite - the sweet potato pie. "Sometimes, all of a sudden, I just have to have a sweet potato," Todd English, the Boston chef whose Mediterranean-influenced restaurant empire is spreading across the United States, wrote in an introduction to his recipe for a lovely sweet potato soup flavored with hints of cinnamon and ginger and coconut milk. "And when I do, I always ask myself why I don't eat them more often." Sweet potatoes may even be a little trendy. When Clint Woods, corporate chef for Fox Restaurants in Tucson, was developing the menu for the new Montana Avenue, he created a sort of savory sweet potato pie, or maybe what you could call scalloped sweet potatoes. While it won't be on the menu right away (instead look for a mashed sweet potato side), the sweet potato pie may appear as a specialty side in the future. Woods peels, then layers thinly sliced sweet potatoes and yams with heavy cream, and seasons them with cloves, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, salt and pepper and a little orange zest. However they are served, sweet potatoes have a place at Montana Avenue , which opens today at 6390 E. Grant Road, near Wilmot Road. "The concept of the restaurant is rustic American cuisine, and sweet potato pie is as American as it gets," Woods said. "We're trying to do different things over there, and that fits the concept." Sweet potatoes go with oranges, maple syrup, pecans, butter and bourbon. The editors of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines like to flavor them with lime and thyme. Ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon spark the sweet potato pie at Mr. K's BBQ, 1830 S. Park Ave. One of the easiest ways to re-acquaint yourself with the sweet potato: Buy the darker-colored yams, a variety like Garnet. Scrub, rub on a little oil or butter, prick with a fork, and bake in a moderate oven, just like you would a white spud. A small tuber will take about 40 minutes to bake, a pound-plus beauty 90 minutes or more. When soft, remove from oven and serve with butter and freshly ground pepper. Just about anything you can do with a regular, or white, potato, you can try with a sweet potato. In return, you'll be enjoying the nutritional powerhouse that is hiding under the yam's modestly knobby exterioir. As the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission notes on its Web site, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest ranks the sweet potato as the most nutritious vegetable around. When the center attached numerical scores to various veggies, the sweet spud rolled up twice the total of its nearest competitor. Sweet potatoes are packed with vitamin A (one serving gets you four times the recommended daily intake of the vitamin's precursor, beta-carotene), vitamin C and fiber. They have a little protein, lots of complex carbohydrates (the "good" kind for you carb-counters) and virtually no fat. You can even eat the greens. Poynter notes that in Africa, people grow some varieties of sweet potatoes just for their greens. "Unfortunately, ours were not those varieties, and they were absolutely disgusting - they were kind of slimy, sour, really bad," she said. The goats, however, loved them.