Online resource   ● For anything you ever wanted to know about sweet potatoes, and a big collection of recipes, you can check out the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission Web site: www.sweetpotato.org     Sweet potato soup   Makes 8 to 10 cups   3 sweet potatoes or yams, scrubbed and pierced several times with the tines of a fork   1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons olive oil   1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt   1 teaspoon black pepper   1 yellow onion, chopped   3 fresh sage leaves, chopped, or 1/2 teaspoon dried sage   1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh ginger   4 cups water   2 1/2 cups apple cider   2 cinnamon sticks   1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil   2 fresh figs, quartered   2 tablespoons unsweetened coconut milk   Yogurt and fig garnish:   1/4 cup honey   4 fresh figs, halved and thinly sliced   1/2 cup plain yogurt   4 scallions, thinly sliced   2 teaspoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves   2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint leaves   Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.   Rub the sweet potatoes with 2 teaspoons of the olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon of the salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper. Place them directly on a rack in the oven and roast until they are tender, about 40 minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, halve, scoop out the flesh, and discard the skin. Set aside.   Place a stockpot over medium-high heat and when it is hot, add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add the onion, sage, ginger, and sweet potatoes, stirring well after each addition. Cook for 2 minutes. Add the water, apple cider, cinnamon sticks, sesame oil, figs, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Cook for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.   Discard the cinnamon sticks and transfer the soup to a blender. Add the coconut milk and purée until smooth.   Meanwhile, to make the garnish: Place a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the honey and figs and cook until the figs caramelize, about 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from heat. Add the yogurt, scallions, cilantro, and mint, and mix well. Remove from the heat.   Ladle the soup into bowls and spoon a dollop of the garnish onto each one. (The soup can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.)   Note: If you are in a hurry, or blanch at the price of fresh figs, you can make the garnish without them and use dried figs in the soup.     - From: "The Olives Table" by Todd English and Sally Sampson (Simon & Schuster, 1997).     Sweet potato pie with pecan topping and crust   Makes 1 (9-inch) pie   Toasted nuts   2 cups pecan pieces (or 1 cup pecan pieces and 1 cup pecan meal)   Crust   1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour   1 tablespoon granulated sugar   4 ounces (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter   1/4 to 1/2 cup iced water   Filling   18 ounces sweet potatoes   3 large eggs   1 teaspoon vanilla extract   3 tablespoons butter   1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar   2 tablespoons honey   1/2 teaspoon cinnamon   1/2 teaspoon nutmeg   1/2 teaspoon ground cloves   1/2cup whipping cream   Topping   1/4 cup ( 1/2 stick) unsalted butter   1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar   2 tablespoons honey   Toasted nuts: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread the pecan pieces (or pecan pieces and meal) on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes, stirring once, until pecans are lightly browned. Remove and cool.   Crust: Place all-purpose flour, granulated sugar and 1 cup pecan pieces (or the pecan meal) in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Process until pecans are finely ground.   Cut butter into 8 pieces and add to bowl. Pulse until butter is in small pieces. Sprinkle 1/4 cup of ice water over contents of bowl. Pulse until blended. Add more water 1 tablespoon at a time, pulsing briefly, until dough just begins to come together.   Turn onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Push together into a cushion, then wrap and chill for at least 1 hour.   Roll crust in a circle, fit into a 9-inch pie pan, flute the edges, and return to refrigerator while you make the filling.   These steps can all be done a day or two in advance.   Filling: If you have let oven cool, preheat it to 350 degrees. Bake sweet potatoes until tender, about 1 hour. Cool potatoes; peel. Purée in processor. Transfer purée to a bowl, and whisk in eggs and vanilla. Cook butter in heavy medium skillet over medium heat until melted and brown. Add sugar, honey and the spices, and boil 1 minute, stirring constantly. Whisk in cream. Add butter mixture to potato purée; blend until smooth.   Pour filling into crust. Bake until center moves only slightly when pan is shaken, covering with foil if crust browns too quickly, about 40 minutes. Make topping while filling bakes   Topping: Stir 3 ingredients in heavy medium saucepan over low heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and boil 1 minute. Mix in remaining 1 cup of toasted nuts, coating completely.   Remove pie from oven and spoon hot nut mixture over pie. Return to oven and continue baking until topping bubbles, about 5 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool completely.   - From Rebecca Boren     Quick Hits   Caramelized sweet potatoes. Peel and cut 2 pounds of jumbo yams into 2-inch cubes. Toss with a touch of olive oil and salt and pepper. Bake on cookie sheet for 20 minutes at 350 degrees, or until tender.   In a sauté pan, melt 1/4 cup butter, add 1 cup brown sugar and stir over medium heat until dissolved. Add yams, then 1/2 cup vegetable stock, and reduce until sauce is as thick as you want.   – From Terra Cotta restaurant   Sweet potato chips. Peel about 3 pounds (4 good-size) sweet potatoes. With a mandoline or knife, slice 1/16th-inch thick and pat dry with paper towels. Heat oil in a deep fat fryer or deep skillet to 380 degrees. Fry the chips in batches, turning them, until golden brown.   Drain on layers of paper towels and sprinkle with salt or lime salt made by combining the zest from 4 limes with a couple of teaspoons of salt.   Makes enough for a party.   – Adapted from www.epicurious.com

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. Online resource

 

● For anything you ever wanted to know about sweet potatoes, and a big collection of recipes, you can check out the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission Web site: www.sweetpotato.org Sweet potato soup Makes 8 to 10 cups 3 sweet potatoes or yams, scrubbed and pierced several times with the tines of a fork 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons olive oil 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt 1 teaspoon black pepper 1 yellow onion, chopped 3 fresh sage leaves, chopped, or 1/2 teaspoon dried sage 1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh ginger 4 cups water 2 1/2 cups apple cider 2 cinnamon sticks 1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil 2 fresh figs, quartered 2 tablespoons unsweetened coconut milk Yogurt and fig garnish: 1/4 cup honey 4 fresh figs, halved and thinly sliced 1/2 cup plain yogurt 4 scallions, thinly sliced 2 teaspoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves 2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint leaves Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Rub the sweet potatoes with 2 teaspoons of the olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon of the salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of the pepper. Place them directly on a rack in the oven and roast until they are tender, about 40 minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, halve, scoop out the flesh, and discard the skin. Set aside. Place a stockpot over medium-high heat and when it is hot, add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add the onion, sage, ginger, and sweet potatoes, stirring well after each addition. Cook for 2 minutes. Add the water, apple cider, cinnamon sticks, sesame oil, figs, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Cook for 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. Discard the cinnamon sticks and transfer the soup to a blender. Add the coconut milk and purée until smooth. Meanwhile, to make the garnish: Place a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the honey and figs and cook until the figs caramelize, about 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from heat. Add the yogurt, scallions, cilantro, and mint, and mix well. Remove from the heat. Ladle the soup into bowls and spoon a dollop of the garnish onto each one. (The soup can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.) Note: If you are in a hurry, or blanch at the price of fresh figs, you can make the garnish without them and use dried figs in the soup. - From: "The Olives Table" by Todd English and Sally Sampson (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

 

Sweet potato pie with pecan topping and crust Makes 1 (9-inch) pie Toasted nuts 2 cups pecan pieces (or 1 cup pecan pieces and 1 cup pecan meal) Crust 1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon granulated sugar 4 ounces (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter 1/4 to 1/2 cup iced water Filling 18 ounces sweet potatoes 3 large eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar 2 tablespoons honey 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/2cup whipping cream Topping 1/4 cup ( 1/2 stick) unsalted butter 1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar 2 tablespoons honey Toasted nuts: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread the pecan pieces (or pecan pieces and meal) on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes, stirring once, until pecans are lightly browned. Remove and cool. Crust: Place all-purpose flour, granulated sugar and 1 cup pecan pieces (or the pecan meal) in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Process until pecans are finely ground. Cut butter into 8 pieces and add to bowl. Pulse until butter is in small pieces. Sprinkle 1/4 cup of ice water over contents of bowl. Pulse until blended. Add more water 1 tablespoon at a time, pulsing briefly, until dough just begins to come together. Turn onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Push together into a cushion, then wrap and chill for at least 1 hour. Roll crust in a circle, fit into a 9-inch pie pan, flute the edges, and return to refrigerator while you make the filling. These steps can all be done a day or two in advance. Filling: If you have let oven cool, preheat it to 350 degrees. Bake sweet potatoes until tender, about 1 hour. Cool potatoes; peel. Purée in processor. Transfer purée to a bowl, and whisk in eggs and vanilla. Cook butter in heavy medium skillet over medium heat until melted and brown. Add sugar, honey and the spices, and boil 1 minute, stirring constantly. Whisk in cream. Add butter mixture to potato purée; blend until smooth. Pour filling into crust. Bake until center moves only slightly when pan is shaken, covering with foil if crust browns too quickly, about 40 minutes. Make topping while filling bakes Topping: Stir 3 ingredients in heavy medium saucepan over low heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and boil 1 minute. Mix in remaining 1 cup of toasted nuts, coating completely. Remove pie from oven and spoon hot nut mixture over pie. Return to oven and continue baking until topping bubbles, about 5 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool completely. - From Rebecca Boren

 

Quick Hits

 

Caramelized sweet potatoes. Peel and cut 2 pounds of jumbo yams into 2-inch cubes. Toss with a touch of olive oil and salt and pepper. Bake on cookie sheet for 20 minutes at 350 degrees, or until tender. In a sauté pan, melt 1/4 cup butter, add 1 cup brown sugar and stir over medium heat until dissolved. Add yams, then 1/2 cup vegetable stock, and reduce until sauce is as thick as you want. – From Terra Cotta restaurant Sweet potato chips. Peel about 3 pounds (4 good-size) sweet potatoes. With a mandoline or knife, slice 1/16th-inch thick and pat dry with paper towels. Heat oil in a deep fat fryer or deep skillet to 380 degrees. Fry the chips in batches, turning them, until golden brown. Drain on layers of paper towels and sprinkle with salt or lime salt made by combining the zest from 4 limes with a couple of teaspoons of salt. Makes enough for a party. – Adapted from www.epicurious.com