Last night I roasted three sweet potatoes in the toaster oven, the actual oven being nonfunctional. We didn’t get around to eating them (being happily distracted by things that took less time to get to the table; namely, thyme-y fried eggplant, spaghetti with eggs beaten in to make it creamy, and sausage ‘n’ onions). So this morning I peeled a large sweet potato, mashed it, beat in 4 eggs, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp salt, and 1/2 c. flour. I dolloped the batter into a medium-hot well-oiled skillet and fried the little cakes till dark-golden on each side. Tender, light, nutritious, lactose-free, and infinitely simple. Next time: raisins in the batter.
Less related to this morning’s pleasant activities, I’m frankly fed up to here with this whole sweet potato/yam nomenclature controversy. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not the only one: I had been operating under the assumption that the terms were synonymous in common North American usage, referring to a delectable orange tuber, though the “true yam” was a starchy staple food of western Africa. Then I had to make signs at work to discriminate between the white sweet potatoes and the orange ones -- and what do you know but the LESS sweet of the two should be granted the name “sweet potato”, while the vitamin-packed, dense, moist, and truly sweet sister should be called a “yam”?
The solution to this entire controversy, of course, is to eliminate cultivation of the white starchy thing, whatever it is, and eat the much more delicious orange sweet potato, which is tasty enough to take on many names.
This is how I eat salad in December. By the crunchy, juicy-bitter, burgundy plateful. With a slice of dense bread under fork-marked pâté, I call it lunch.
Orange sycamore leaves: San Francisco's rare bit of evidence that it is, indeed, December. The sweetgum trees are just starting to turn.
