Alabama Sass Potatoes

Now reader, I know I've been on a bit of a sweet potato kick recently. The recipes are probably starting to blend together. However, I stumbled upon a recipe online that I just couldn't resist. I took my most recent sweet potatoes, which I was pretty happy with, and blended in this recipe. It didn't work out as well as I had hoped, but at this point I'm confident that the changes I'll discuss at the end will make this into the recipe that I meant to be making in the first place.

Ingredients:

4	sweet potatoes
1 cup	orange juice
3	oranges
1 1/2 inches	fresh ginger
1	carrot
1/3 cup	brown sugar
4 cloves	garlic
1 tsp	cinnamon
1/2 tsp	nutmeg
1/4 tsp	salt

Procedure:
Peel potatoes and slice into thin medallions. Boil them for about 15 minutes, until tender. Preheat the oven to 350F. Peel oranges slice into medallions, shooting for eight per orange, plus the ends. Slice carrot thinly.



If possible, pulp ginger with a fine cheese grater; otherwise, mince it. Blend them with the brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and the ends of the oranges into a paste.



Gently coat the orange slices in the paste. They will probably try to fall apart on you. Arrange one potato's worth of slices uniformly over the bottom of your baking pan. Arrange an orange's worth of slices over them. Alternate layers until all oranges and potatoes have been added, with the top layer being one of potatoes.



Mix any remaining paste into the orange juice and pour over the potatoes. Put the carrots on top and bake for 45 minutes. Makes about 8 sizable servings as a side dish.



The reason that the carrots go on top is because I forgot to incorporate them into the layers. That's where they belong. That's something I'll fix next time. As it was, this turned out pretty well but showed even more promise.

The online recipe called for butter which I did not use. I don't know that it would have added much. They also talk about how the orange juice should turn into sort of a syrup. I did not bake mine for long enough to see this happen, but it was starting to. And it was good. Unfortunately, one cup of orange juice was not enough to get all of the potatoes syrupy, even though I used 4 instead of the 6 recommended.

Additionally, I thought I was being fancy by putting the sugar slime on the oranges. It didn't really work. The oranges were too strong and the potatoes didn't get as much of the flavor as I meant them to.

When I repeat this recipe, I will use an extra carrot or two, they'll be boiled with the sweet potatoes. They will not boil for as long, perhaps only 10 minutes. The carrots and potatoes will be used together to build layers alternating with the orange slices.

Quantities of brown sugar and orange juice will be doubled and supplemented by black pepper, ground ginger, and ground cloves. I'll get rid of the garlic, as I think it doesn't really belong. The paste and orange juice will be mixed together and added incrementally over the layers of sweet potatoes. The baking time will increase, perhaps to an hour. In this additional time I would hope to see a notable amount more thickening of the syrup.

This is getting me all excited.