Let your sweet potatoes sit!

Hey all. I happened to be at a farmers conference this weekend for work, and learned something pretty important about sweet potatoes! They're supposed to sit out someplace warm (like on a windowsill or in your cupboard) and "cure" for solid week or two between harvesting and eating! According to the farmers I spoke with, curing gives the sugars in those sweet potatoes time to get themselves together, so they actually get sweeter with time. Eating the sweet potatoes straight out of the garden isn't bad for you or anything, but they won't be as sweet as if you let them sit out for a week or two. So, if your kid(s) brought home sweet potatoes from the Boys Club on Friday evening, please consider setting them out someplace for a week or two before you cook with them. I'm sorry I didn't tell you all sooner!
The good news is that our sweet potatoes should be perfectly cured by Thanksgiving. :)

Pictures from sweet potato digging day. :)

We got a really good haul of sweet potatoes today. Enjoy the pictures!

Digging sweet potatoes 11-9-07

Sweet potatoes on Friday!

Hey all! We'll be digging sweet potatoes from the garden on Friday, and with any luck, you'll be getting at least a couple pounds worth coming home with your kids that evening. Yum!! I can't wait. I wanted to give you one of my favorite sweet potato recipes - I've adapted this recipe from a cookbook called Moosewood Celebrates, and I've tried it using both sweet potatoes and butternut squash....I bet it would work with other winter squashes too, like pumpkin, acorn squash, buttercup squash, or whatever you've got. It's good alone as a side dish, or as a main course together with some rice or a salad or something like that. And, there's always leftover peanut sauce, which you can save for a couple weeks in the fridge and put on noodles or meats or greens, or really whatever floats your boat. Good stuff, I hope you enjoy!

Sweet Potatoes & Eggplant with Peanut Sauce
adapted from a recipe in "Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates"
Moosewood writes: "This is a richly flavorful dish, inspired by the foods of West Africa, where true yams would replace our North American sweet potatoes and where a paste of groundnuts might replace the crunchy peanut butter. It is a good example of Kwanza cookery, drawing inspiration from mother Africa and using domestic foods of the American South. We think the sauce has a real kick to it (but we know it doesn't hold a candle to the fiery hotness of some West African cooking)."

Baked sweet potatoes and eggplant
2 medium purple eggplants (or 5-10 smaller eggplants, or Japanese eggplants)
1 large bell pepper, red or green, seeded and diced
2 - 4 cups diced sweet potatoes (depends how much you've got!)
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
pinch of salt

Spicy peanut sauce
2 tablespoons sesame chili oil
- or -
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or plain sesame oil and 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder or cayenne pepper (or more, if you like spicy food!)
1-1/2 cups chopped onion (one or two medium onions)
2 tablespons grated fresh ginger root (if you've got it - you can also skip it)
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter, preferably the natural, unsalted kind
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons molasses or honey
2 tablespoons white or cider vinegar
2 cups tomato juice - or - 2 cups crushed tomatoes (comes in a can)
salt to taste

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil a 9 x 13 inch baking pan.
Chop up the eggplants, sweet potatoes and bell pepper into chunks about half an inch wide. Mix them together with the oil so that everything's evenly coated, and then put it all in the baking pan and bake until it's soft, but not too soft - usually about 30 minutes.
While that's in the oven, make the peanut sauce! Heat the oil in a saucepan on medium-high heat and saute the onions for about 3 minutes. Add the ginger root (if you're using it) and the cayenne or chili pepper (if you're using that), and saute it for another minute or two. Then, add the peanut butter, soy sauce, molasses or honey, vinegar, and tomato juice or crushed tomatoes. Stir it all up, then cover the pot, turn down the heat, and let it all get hot and smooth. Stir it frequently so the bottom doesn't scorch. At this point, you can taste test, and add more salt or cayenne/chili if you want it.
When both dishes are done, you're ready to go! You can mix some of the peanut sauce right in to the baked vegetables, or you can dish out the veggies and then spoon the sauce over top. This would be really good over rice. When the peanut sauce cools again, it'll get a lot thicker - if it gets too thick, you can thin it out a bit by adding a little more tomato juice or water.

Pumpkin Pie & Butternut Squash

In the spirit of Halloween, I made some pumpkin pies last night to bring to the Boys Club today. I hope they're good!!

I based my recipe on this one: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Pie-II/Detail.aspx
Most pumpkin pie recipes call for heavy cream or sweetened condensed milk, but I chose this one because it calls for only regular milk. That's good, both from an economy standpoint (I already had milk, but not cream!), and from a health standpoint, since heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk are quite fatty. I made several other changes to the recipe:

1 - Instead of canned pumpkin puree, I used fresh pumpkin that I got at Hilltop Farms last week. We grew pumpkins in the Boys Club Garden this year, but none of them made it this late in the season! We'll have to grow more next year. So anyway, one "pie pumpkin" is usually enough to make about two pies. (Or, instead of letting it go bad on your front stoop, you can use your leftover jack-o-lantern!!) First you need to cook the pumpkin - the best results are from baking it until it gets soft (between 30 mins and an hour, depending), though you can also cut it into chunks and boil or steam it on the stove. Then, let it cool off a bit, and scoop the meat of the pumpkin out of the skin. Toss (or compost!) the skin, but save all the meat and mash it or run it through a blender or food processor. Presto, you have pumpkin puree!

2 - This recipe calls for 2.5 cups of sugar - whoa! Even divided between two pies, that sounded like a lot, so I used just 1 cup of sugar. The result is very nice - sweet, but not so sweet that you can't taste the pumpkin and the spices.

Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty closely, and I think it came out pretty well! I hope the boys like it.

Next week, I'll be bringing butternut squashes with me to the garden for the boys to take home, so I wanted to direct you to some info and recipes for butternut squash. For one thing, you can use butternut squash instead of pumpkin in the pie recipe above - it has a very similar texture, and it's even more naturally sweet than a pumpkin! Butternut squash can also be baked and eaten plain with butter and/or brown sugar, and it's also commonly made into soup. Here are some pages all about butternut squash:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/produce/wintersquash.html
http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/butternut_spuash.htm

Good luck, and have fun!

New blog!

Hello all!
Welcome to the new blog for the Boys Club Garden. We'll post pictures of our gardeners in action and recipes for them and their families to cook all the good stuff they're growing.
Thanks for reading!