Sass Yams

Dearest readers, I've missed you. I know you've been checking back patiently, waiting for me to write to you again. Unfortunately, I've spent the last few weeks getting beaten up by a Canadian physicist. Most of my cooking recently has been old favorites which keep me fed but make for poor updates.

But not today. Today I took a great step towards fixing a recipe I continue to be excited about, the roasted orange sweet potatoes with chicken.

Last time I was unimpressed by the rub and decided to return to it later. I realized recently that I can figure out a solution without dealing with chicken at all. The chicken will work out fine no matter what since chicken breasts don't taste like anything. What's important is the fine tuning of the sweet potatoes.

So I proceeded to make a rub as if I were going to use it on chicken, then cook sweet potatoes with it. It turned out very well so I will use this same recipe the next time I make a roasted chicken and sweet potato adventure.

Ingredients:

3	sweet potatoes
2	oranges
1	lemon
2	garlic cloves
1.5 inches	fresh ginger
1/3 cup	brown sugar
1 tsp	ground cinnamon
1 tsp	black pepper

Procedure:
Zest oranges and lemon. Set aside zest and squeeze one orange's worth of juice into a large pan. Peel sweet potatoes and cut into wedges. Place them in the same pan and add water sufficient to cover them. Boil for 10-15 minutes to soften them while you preheat the oven to 350F.



Mince together all dry ingredients, garlic, ginger, and the zest. Add a little of the juice from the second orange in order to make this easier. You will end up with a paste.



Drain the potatoes. Spread the paste and remaining orange juice over them as uniformly as possible. This can be done by adding the paste to the sweet potato pan, squeezing the orange over the paste to soften it, then mixing it together (gently! don't mash your potatoes!). The lemon should also be juiced over the potatoes at this point, though I forgot to do so.

Butter a baking sheet and spread the potatoes out in a single layer. Roast for 20-30 minutes, depending on how dry you want the "skin" on the wedges to be. Sprinkle with salt and serve. Makes 3 sweet potatoes' worth, obviously. This is really more of a snack than a meal so it's debatable how many servings that is.



I added the garlic and black pepper to this otherwise sweet recipe in tentative quantities but it's clear that they belong. Next time quantities of each will be doubled. Additionally, the amount of orange flavor you get from an orange just can't compete with the plethora of strong flavors present. This recipe could be profitably supplemented by a sploosh of orange juice. Similarly the fresh ginger could use the help of perhaps 1/2 tsp of ground ginger.

Again, this recipe exists for the purpose of research on roasted orange chicken with sweet potatoes. Next time I use this mixture, along with the changes I've prescribed, the technique will parallel my previous post.