Weekly Recipes: The Sweet Potato

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Welcome to the weekly recipes post! The idea is to give folks who want to try new recipes ideas.  Each week we'll have a theme chosen from the themes list on this post. If you would like to suggest a theme, comment there and I'll add it to the top of the list.

If you would like to signup to write the opening post and pick out a theme for the week because you found a really awesome recipe or you love a certain vegetable, let me know in comments what week you want and it's yours.

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This week's recipe star is the sweet potato. Orange or yellow, knarly, and totally delicious.

Five fun facts about the sweet potato according to Wikipedia
1. It's Latin name is Ipomoea batatas
2. It was domesticated in Central or South America around 5,000 years ago
3. China now grows about 100,000,000 tonnes of sweet potatoes and uses about half of them for livestock feed
4. It has complex carbohydrates, fiber, beta carotene that leads to vitamin A production, vitamin C and vitamin B6, iron, and calcium
5. In South America indigenous cultures, the juice of red sweet potatoes is added to lime juice to make dye for cloth

What me and my cooking buddy did with sweet potatoes last night was very simple. We did the Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Scallion Butter recipe from epicurious.

Ingredients
8 small Japanese or Garnet sweet potatoes - we used regular orange sweet potatoes and about twice as many since my friend had a lot on hand that she needed to use up
1.5 sticks of unsalted butter, well softened - we used 1 stick
1.5 tablspoons of miso paste, preferably white
3 tablespoons of finely chopped scallion

What to do
First you roast the potatoes. Preheat the oven to 450 and when it's ready put the sweet potatoes on a foil covered backing sheet and stick them in for 40 minutes to an hour - until their done.

While that's going stir the soft butter, miso paste, and scallion together.

When you pull out the potatoes and plate them, cut them lengthwise and mash them a little like you would a baked potato, then top it with the butter/miso/scallion combo. It's lots of butter, but it's delicious.

We had the sweet potatoes with rice and tempe, onions, and poblano peppers sautéed in a jarred curry sauce.

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The basic roast sweet potato from the first step above is good too, even without the fancy butter topping. I've done it successfully with pre-sliced potatoes, a little butter or olive oil and rosemary.

You can also mash sweet potatoes like you would regular potatoes, and then there's the classic US Thanksgiving dish where you add in a ton of sugar and marshmallows to mashed sweet potatoes.

I also buy a bag of frozen sweet potato fries on occasion and they go in the oven for 20 minutes as a nice side dish.

What are your favorite sweet potato recipes?