Prize Worthy Sweet Potato Galette

How did the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission know we are growing our own sweet potatoes?

I just received an e-mail urging me to enter a "bloggers recipe contest" sponsored by the sweet potato commission. I might have blown it off, but the reward for best recipe is $1,000. That got me thinking maybe I should post one of our favorite methods for putting sweet potatoes on the dinner table--this sweet potato galette.

A potato galette in the French country style traditionally is made with standard potatoes. But we love sweet potatoes--they are so nutritious and full of flavor--and now we harvest them out of our own kitchen garden, right here in the District of Columbia about a mile from the White House. One day I was trying to think of a way to incorporate sweet potatoes with something else we grow plenty of: greens. And to continue the local theme, I decided to add one of our favorite Maryland cheeses. Why not layer them all together? The sweet potato galette was born.

To make the galette, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Coat the bottom of a well-seasoned, cast-iron skillet with extra virgin olive oil and place it over moderate heat. Peel three large sweet potatoes and slice them into thin rounds. (A mandoline makes quick work of this.) Shingle the rounds to cover the bottom of the skillet. The bottom-most potatoes will begin to cook and brown while you are assembling the rest. Between each layer, dot the potatoes with cooked greens, such as mustard greens or kale or collard greens. Or, better yet, a combination of greens. You will need about one pound of cooked greens total.

Alternate layers of cheese. I've used a soft Gorgonzola in the past. But for a strictly local galette, I bought a piece of blue goat's milk cheese from Firefly Farms in Bittinger, MD. Firefly is one of the regular vendors at the Dupont Circle market. Between each layer, after you've capped it off with more potatoes, press down very firmly with a flat object, such as a pot lid or another skillet. Then season with olive oil, salt and black pepper.

Continue layering the galette until the skillet is nearly filled to the top. Place in the oven and bake until the potatoes are easily pierced with a metal trussing skewer, about 20 minutes. Remove the skillet and allow the galette to cool. To remove the galette from the skillet, use a knife or spatula to cut around the edge, then invert it onto a large plate or cutting board.

This galette is delicious warm or even at room temperature, and it can easily be made ahead and reheated. The sweetness of the potatoes seems to meld exceptionally well with the pungency of the cheese and the pleasant bitterness of the greens. Try it with your favorite local salad and a crisp glass of Chablis. Or if you've got a particular hankering for meat, this galette would be an ideal partner for a juicy pork roast.

Buying Sweet Potato Seedlings

Do you buy sweet potato seedlings? Or do you prefer to sprout your own sweet potatoes?

I always thought of sprouting sweet potatoes as an elementary school project. But apparently that's what some gardeners do to plant their sweet potatoes.

I guess that makes me a lazy gardener. I get my plants from a small, family-owned business in Tennessee that makes me smile every time I think of them growing my little Beauregards. Here's a picture of them, the folks who run the Steele Plant Company in Gleason, TN.

"Everyone pictured here just hopes that you will send us your order this year so we can send you plants that will help you have the most enjoyable gardening experience you have ever had," says the literature I recently received in the mail. It comes printed on thin newsprint, like your local monthly shopper, with pictures of the storage house and the packing facility and one of the potato fields.

There are also photos of the founders, W. Claude Steele, a produce man, and Dudley Sanders, a school teacher. According to the company's website, the two men started the business as a second source of income. It grew into a full-time affair that has lasted 56 years.

Last year when I ordered I spoke to someone on the phone and he was pretty glum. The weather in Gleason had been cold and wet and they were just barely getting their plants ready in time for shipping. Steele Plant has at least six different shipping dates, tailored to different climate zones around the country.

Along with onions, the company sells several different types of sweet potatoes, including white sweet potatoes and a deep red Japanese variety called "Taste of the Orient." This year I'll be sticking with Beauregard. We had excellent results with it last year (not so much with the white variety we tried). We'll be getting 25 plants, which should keep us in sweet potatoes for months. With each order comes a16-page booklet with four pages of growing and storage instructions and 12 pages of "prize winning recipes...cakes, pies, pudding,custard, casseroles, cobblers."

This year we might even visit the annual sweet potato festival in Gleason, otherwise known as the "Tatertown Special." "This community affair draws thousands back home to their roots to renew old friendships and make new acquaintances," the bulletin declares. "Parades, old-fashioned Gospel singings, arts and crafts, and other activities make for a fun-filled weekend. You might even see Gleason's most famous citizen--Mike Snider, member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville!!!"

Isn't it comforting to know that somewhere in America they are still holding an annual sweet potato festival?

Thank you, Steele Plant Company. I will be dropping my order in the mail today.

Creamed Chipped Ham & Collards

This just proves that flavor doesn't care where it comes from.

In anticipation of boiling some collards, I simmered smoked turkey necks for a long time in a pot of water, then added a ham bone that turned up in the process of catering a client's buffet.

This mongrel broth was not so much to look at. But I was certain it would lend some big flavor to our greens. Just before cooking the greens, however, I remembered a big hunk of leftover ham in the fridge. Now, there are a lot of things you can make with leftover ham. But if you haven't made creamed ham in a while, a vision of dinner begins to form.

Instead of pouring all that mongrel broth in the pot, I set aside two cups to make a sauce for my ham. I sauteed two shallots, cut into small dice, in 3 tablespoons butter. When the shallots were soft, I added 3 tablespoons flour and cooked that gently for just a few minutes. Then I poured in my 2 cups of broth and turned it into a sauce, adding some milk and finally a bit of half-and-half for richness. As you can see in the photo, you are looking for a gravy-like consistency. Add perhaps 1/3 cup crumbled cheddar cheese and stir until it has completely melted. Finally, add your ham, cut into dice, until it begins to look like creamed chipped ham and season it with salt, pepper and a bit of freshly ground nutmeg.

I also had some leftover riced sweet potatoes, so this was lunch: that velvety creamed chipped ham poured over sweet potatoes, with collards on the side. The sound you hear is my wife moaning over the creamed ham.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

We like to use sweet potato biscuit during the holiday season to make little cocktail sandwiches for a buffet. Simply cut the biscuits open and lay them out assembly line style. We stuff some sandwiches with roasted turkey breast and cranberry chutney. Others we make with a roast ham and grainy mustard.

The biscuits you see here are not sweet potato biscuits but our other favorite, buttermilk biscuits. The recipes are very similar, however, and the standard admonitions apply: Don't work the dough too much, and bake at a fairly high temperature.

The sweet potatoes do give the biscuits a festive air. We use the recipe in Bill Neal's Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie.

2 cups low-gluten all-purpose flour (such as White Lily or Gold Medal)

Heaping 1/2 teaspoon salt

3 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

5 tablespoons chilled butter

4 ounces (1/2 cup) sweet potato, either roasted and riced, or pureed from a can

7/8 cup whole milk

Preheat oven to 475 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add the butter in pieces and work it into the flour using quick pinching motions of the fingers. The flour and butter should be completely incorporated, until it looks a little like sand. Mix in sweet potato. Add milk and stir until dough forms a ball.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead lightly, about 10 strokes. Stop as soon as the dough begins to look smooth.

Roll dough out to a thickness of about 3/4 inch, then cut into 2-inch rounds. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and place in the oven until biscuits are lightly browned, about 8 minutes.

Note: My wife thinks the standard oven temperatures recommended for baking biscuits--475 to 500 degrees--are too high. She likes to cook hers at 425 degrees, and I must say, they are delicious: light and airy.

Sweet Potato Pie

Really, all I wanted from my wife the baker were a few tips for making a sweet potato pie.

We have all these sweet potatoes harvested from the garden and sweet potato pie was pencilled in as dessert for our choucroute dinner. But as so often happens, making this pie would not be as easy as--well, pie. We first had to have a discussion.

My idea was to make the pie in Bill Neal's classic Southern cookbook, Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie. What could be more authentic, I reasoned,
than a pie from the legendary Bill Neal and a book with sweet potato pie right in the title?

But my wife was not convinced. As she so often does in these situations, she first wanted to check Bill Neal's recipe against the one in The New Best Recipe, the tome from Cook's Illustrated that my wife considers her recipe bible. Sure enough, she started picking Bill Neal's version apart, piece by piece. Too much molasses. Not enough egg. Dry sherry--huh?

My wife thinks I'm crazy not to be in love with The New Best Recipe. My main beef is, the authors seem to be less interested in authenticity than in their own idealized vision of how certain foods should be. Using their personal bias as a starting point, they then weed through recipes from hither and yon, adjusting and changing them as they go until they arrive at something that more or less matches their preconceived notions.

Apparently, that suits my wife just fine. And being a man of a certain age, I've learned that beating your chest is useless. The female species is always right. It's wiser to just submit.

Hence, sweet potato pie from The New Best Recipe, wherein the authors seek "to create a distinctive sweet potato pie, a recipe that honored the texture and flavor of sweet potatoes while being sufficiently recognizable as a dessert. Neither a custardy, pumpkin-style pie nor a masked-potatoes-in-a-crust pie would do."


For the pie filling:

2 pounds sweet potatoes

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

3 large eggs, plus 2 large egg yolks

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

2-3 tablespoons bourbon

1 tablespoon molasses

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup whole milk

1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar

Prick the sweet potatoes several times with a fork and place them on a double layer of paper towels in a microwave (I bake my sweet potatoes at 325 degrees in the oven). Cook at full power for 5 minutes, turn each potato over and continue to cook at full power until tender but not mushy, about 5 minutes longer. Cool 10 minutes. Halve a potato crosswise, insert a small spoon between the skin and flesh and scoop the flesh into a medium bowl. Discard the skin. (If the potatoes are too hot to handle, use paper towels as a wrapper.) Repeat with remaining sweet potatoes. You should have about 2 cups. While potatoes are still hot, add butter and mash with a fork or wooden spoon. Small lumps of potato should remain.

Whisk together the eggs, yolks, sugar, nutmeg and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in bourbon, molasses and vanilla. Whisk in milk. Gradually add egg mixture to sweet potatoes, whisking gently to combine. Set aside.

For a pre-baked crust:

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the work surface

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

3 tablespoons vegetables shortening, chilled

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

4-5 tablespoons ice water.

Process flour, salt and sugar in a food process until combined. Add shortening and process until mixture has the texture of coarse sand, about 10 seconds. Scatter butter pieces over flour mixture, then cut butter into flour until mixture is pale yellow and resembles coarse crumbs, with butter bits no larger than small peas, about 10 1-second pulses. Turn mixture into a medium bowl.

Sprinkle 4 tablespoons ice water over mixture. Use rubber spatula and folding motion to mix. Press down on dough with broad side of spatula until dough sticks together, adding up to 1 tablespoon more ice water if dough will not come together. Flatten dough into 4-inch disk. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least 1 hour or up to 2 days before rolling.

Remove dough from refrigerator and let stand until malleable. Roll dough on lightly floured surface into a 12-inch circle. Transfer dough to a 9-inch pie plate by rolling the dough around the rolling pin and unrolling it over the pan. Working around the circumference of the pie plate, ease the dought into the pan corners by gently lifting the edge of the dough with one hand while gently pressing it into the pan bottom with the other hand. Trim the dough edges to extend about 1/2 inch beyond the rim of the pan. Fold the overhang under itself; flute the dough or press the tine of a fork against the dough to flatten it against the rim of the pie plate. Refrigerate the dough-lined pie plate until firm, about 40 minutes, then freeze until very cold, about 20 minutes.

Adjust an oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 375 degrees. Remove the dough-lined pie plate from the freezer, press a doubled 12-inch piece of heavy-duty foil inside the pie shell and fold the edges of the foil to shield the fluted edge. Distribute 2 cups ceramic or metal pie weights over the foil (my wife used some pennies in addition to her pie weights). Bake, leaving the foil and weights in place until the dough looks dry and is light in color, 25 to 30 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and weights by gathering the corners of the foil and pulling up and out. For a partially baked crust, continue baking until light golden brown, 5 to 6 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees.


While the crust is still warm, cover the bottom with 1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar and the pie filling. Pour pie filling over the brown sugar. Bake on the lower-middle rack until the filling is set around the edges but the center jiggles slightly when shaken, about 45 minutes. Transfer pie to a wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours, before serving with your best whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

The brown sugar creates an unexpected layer of flavor at the bottom of the pie. We knew the pie was just right when our friend Pete, a West Virginia native who has an unerring taste for home-cooked food, sat bolt upright at the dinner table and nearly dropped his fork.

"Dang, that's good!" Pete exclaimed. "How did you do that? Mine is almost always flat."

Well, my wife would say it's all about The New Best Recipe, Pete. And I ain't gonna argue. (Bill Neal, wherever you are, eat your heart out.)

Season's First Choucroute

Choucroute as a recipe is less important than the people you invite to eat it with. So thank you Linda, Tom, Larry, Valca, Pete and Steve for joining us last night. Since we were all basking in the glow of Tuesday's election results, this also constituted our Kumbaya moment.

Choucroute is a classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut and pork products but there is no single agreed-upon way to make it. In other words, don't feel you have to make it exactly as written in your picture book of French cookery. My own method starts with home-made sauerkraut, shown in the photo at left beginning with about 10 pounds of shredded cabbage and six tablespoons of pickling salt packed firmly in a heavy plastic bucket so that the brine that leaches from the cabbage rises over the top. Give it a month or more to finish.

I then hop on the subway to Capitol Hill to select my pork products from the local butchers: a smoked hock or shank, bacon ends, smoked chops, fresh pork belly if they have it and Kielbasa sausage and bratwurst. Then I get back on the subway and head downtown to the Cafe Mozart where the deli case holds weisswurst and lots of other goodies. Being made of veal, I'm not sure how traditional weisswurst is in choucroute. But we love it and so do all our guests.

The day before the event, I saute a large onion with some bacon grease at the bottom of our biggest and heaviest cookpot. Cook it until it is soft and lightly caramelized. Then I grate two Granny Smith apples (with skins) directly into the pot before adding about six cups of fresh sauerkraut. I stir in a teaspoon of caraway seeds and about a dozen crushed juniper berries. Then I push my smoked ham hock deep into the middle of the kraut, pour in a half cup of Riesling wine and bring the whole mess to a boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover the pot and let it simmer for an hour or more until the kraut is soft, aromatic and unctuous.

But for this particular choucroute, there was something special: sauerruben, or fermented grated turnips, that have been mellowing in our refrigerator for the last year and a half. They have an other-worldly nutty flavor to go with the mild tang of fermentation. I added about two cups of that to my pot as well. The results were beyond anything we've ever experienced from mere sauerkraut.

While the pot is simmering, brown all of your other meats in a heavy skillet with a little cooking oil or bacon grease. These can be wrapped and refrigerated until the following day, when the sausages, the bacon ends, the smoked chops and the pork belly are all packed into the pot to wait until the guests arrive, when we turn the heat up to a gentle simmer and let those kraut and wine juices steam everything for about 45 minutes.

We loaded the finished kraut and meat onto a big platter and served it buffet-style with roasted parsnips and carrots from the garden, mashed potatoes and homemade apple sauce. All of the guests had brought various German wines and the libations did flow. Conversation was lively, interrupted by exclamations over the turnip-infused kraut.

For dessert, we plated a stunning sweet potato pie made by my wife the baker from sweet potatoes grown just outside the kitchen window. More about that anon. I am still recovering.

Braided Sweet Potato Bread

I'm not the baker in the family--that would be my wife. But I can make this sweet potato bread, which should prove that anyone can do it as well.

This is a versatile bread with a light taste of sweet potatoes, just the thing to help us use that huge haul of sweet potatoes we made from the garden recently. I made some for our recent "food appreciation" classes where the kids spread slices of bread with fresh apple butter. That's another great combination.

The first thing my wife noticed about this loaf was that I'd screwed up the braid. Oh, well. I guess I was AWOL when they were giving braiding instructions. But with an egg glaze nicely browned in the oven, no one really notices. This bread is especially good toasted for breakfast. I've been snacking on it lately, smeared with blue cheese.

The recipe, which I initially posted here, makes two loaves that can be braided or not. Start eating one now and freeze the second loaf for later. Another suggestion: consider replacing some of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour.

Kids Make Apple Butter

Apple butter is just a hop, skip and jump from applesauce. So if you already know how to make applesauce, you are just a couple of steps from having apple butter.

There's no dairy in apple "butter." But it is thicker and darker than apple sauce--another of the thousand or so uses for apples our forebears came up with when apples were such an important part of the diet.

If you are looking for ways to store from the fall harvest, apple butter is a genius stroke as it can easily be canned and stashed in the pantry.

Use a flavorful, cooking-type apple such as Winesap or Jonathan. We chose Mountaineers from nearby West Virginia and Macintosh. For this recipe, you do not remove the skin of the apple (lending some pectin to help thicken the final product) but you do remove the stems and cores. A couple of helpful pieces of equipment are a food mill, as shown in the picture above, and a splatter screen for covering your cook pot.

To make four pints apple butter:

5 pounds apples, cored and cut into eight wedges each (skin on)

1 cup apple cider

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 1/4 cups brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Place apples and cider in a heavy pot, cover and bring to a boil over moderately high heat. Reduce heat and simmer until apples are soft, about 10 minutes.

Process the cooked apples finely through a food mill. Pour the apple puree back into the cook pot and mix with sugars and spices. (Note: use 1/4 cup sugar for each cup of puree). Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and continue cooking uncovered, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom of the pot so that the puree does not scorch. Keep in mind that the thick puree, rather than quietly bubbling, tends to burp and burst and send hot material flying into the air. This is where a splatter screen over your pot comes in handy. You don't want a big mess, but you do want the moisture to evaporate so the puree can thicken.

Continue cooking for an hour or more, until the apple puree has thickened and caramelized to a nutty brown. It should mound up in a spoon.

Now you can ladle the hot apple butter into sterile pint jars. Seal the jars and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

The kids in our "food appreciation" classes had great fun cutting the apples and grinding away at the food mill. Our treat was spreading the finished apple butter on slices sweet potato bread, freshly baked from some of the sweet potatoes recently harvested from our garden. Talk about a tasty snack for fall....

Lunch

Sweet potato mash with ruby chard.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

These sweet potatoes were recently harvested from the garden, roasted in a 325-degree oven, then mashed and seasoned with orange juice, maple syrup, cinnamon and nutmeg.

I have enough leftover mashed sweet potatoes to last the week. I am just finishing the last of this chard, also harvested from the garden and braised with garlic and lemon. Both a little on the sweet side, these two go wonderfully well together, especially the red chard juices mixing with the mash.

Sweet Success

This was our first year growing sweet potatoes and it was far easier than you might think. We bought seedlings through the mail from an outfit in Tennessee and transplanted them in a small plot in our kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.

Within a few weeks, the sweet potato plants were sending out long vines with lots of leaves. We discovered the leaves are edible, which proved to be a great addition to our curried-okra stew. The vines started to take over part of the yard (less grass to mow) and began climbing the tomato cages (the tomatoes didn't seem to mind.)

In other words, we did next to nothing to keep these sweet potatoes going beyond a very occasional watering. Finally, it came time to harvest the sweet potatoes. A bulletin from Purdue University indicated that the plants would continue to thrive until the first freeze. But I was pretty sure the tubers must be ready to come out of the ground.

First, I pulled away all the vines. Too much for us to consume, most of them went into the compost pile. Then I began digging for potatoes with my forked spade. There must be a better way to harvest sweet potatoes, because I injured quite a few with the tines of my spade. Slowly I probed around the bed, heaving the soil and revealing our new bounty.

When I was done, we had a small pile of sweet potatoes, maybe 30 pounds worth. The bulletin from Purdue advises "curing" the potatoes for storage by keeping them in a humid environment around 80 degrees for one or two weeks. Since I don't have a humid, 80-degree environment, I spread the sweet potatoes in a bread rack and they now reside temporarily in our foyer.

What to do with 30 pounds of sweet potatoes? That seems to be the question of the hour, something we will be pondering while the potatoes "cure." I have a favorite recipe for a sweet potato salad with pecans and a maple-orange dressing. Beyond that, we don't consume a lot of sweet potatoes--yet.

Perhaps we should start thinking of options for storing them. Perhaps our readers have some suggestions?

Sweet Potato Leaves

Every once in a while you learn something about the plant kingdom that makes you stop and think, I need to grow that.

So it was with sweet potato leaves, or when I learned that sweet potato leaves are edible. At the time, I did nothing about it. But on a recent visit to One Straw Farm in Baltimore County, owner Joan Norman mentioned that she had been selling sweet potato leaves in the farmers market. She said she had heard about them at an agriculture conference from a man from Africa.

Suddenly I was not only glad I had planted sweet potatoes, but made a priority of finding some way of working the leaves onto our dinner table. The occasion finally arrived last week when I struggled to find something green in the garden to put in our newest most favorite dish, curried okra. We're still harvesting okra on an almost daily basis and this stew with coconut milk, tomatoes and potatoes (basically, anything we can forage from the garden) proved to be a perfect place to use some of the Tuscan kale we were growing.

Well, the kale is gone, but it turns out sweet potato leaves work even better . They have a mild but dense flavor that reminds me a little of purslane. They stand up very well to cooking, maintaining their dark green color and a pleasantly easy texture. As a bonus, the leaves are a good source of vitamins A and C. And like purslane, they can be eaten raw.

Being a vine, the sweet potato plant produces a prodigious amount of leaves in addition to the tasty tuber we'll be harvesting later. At one time I was cursing our sweet potatoes for escaping their bed and traveling all over the yard where I needed to mow. They've climbed up, over and around the tomato cages. Now I'm cheering them on. I say, give us all the leaves you want.

If you are making the okra stew I posted about recently, just add a heaping cup (or two) or sweet potato leaves cut into a chiffonade instead of the kale originally called for. And if you planted sweet potatoes, be happy knowing that you have an almost endless supply of nutritious leaves.

Helluva Burger

South Mountain Creamery, where we subscribe for weekly dairy deliveries, also sells meat products from its own grass-fed cattle. We couldn't resist putting burgers on the menu for the 4th of July, especially my wife's special stuffed burgers.

The stuffing starts with creamed cheese--just the thing to add a little unctuousness to that lean, grass-fed beef, right? Season the creamed cheese with freshly minced garlic, chopped fresh thyme, salt and black pepper. For assembly, lay down a layer of ground beef on some waxed paper, add a big dollop of the cheese mix, then cover with more ground beef, pressing the patty together around the edges.

The burgers can even be made the day ahead and sealed in plastic wrap. Just remove from the fridge a couple of hours before cooking to bring the meat up to room temperature (or not, if you like your burgers especially rare).

We grilled the burgers over mesquite charcoal and served them with our famous sweet potato salad with toasted pecans and orange-maple vinaigrette, as well as a pot of Swiss chard from the garden braised with red onion and pomegranate molasses.

Needless to say, the burgers didn't last long....

Dark Days: Accidental Gypsy Soup

This particular accidental soup begins by cooking some greens in a pot of water and then forgetting about them or just letting them cook longer than you originally intended.

In fact, I had turned the heat pretty low. But nothing gets past my wife, the professional chef. She took note of how long the greens had been cooking, how all the nutrients had been leached out of the greens into the cooking water, and relayed this information to me in the way that spouses sometimes do. I explained that I had purposely turned the heat down so the greens wouldn't overcook, to which my wife replied that the cooking had been going on for at least an hour--she knew precisely, because we had just finished our weekly yoga session, which is an hour long.

Just as this discussion was gathering momentum, a small voice was heard to suggest using the water in which the greens had been cooking as a soup base. This would be our friend and yoga instructor Beth, who happened to be sitting at the kitchen island sipping a cup of coffee and listening in. As friends sometimes do, Beth was trying to rescue the situation. It had not occurred to me to use the cooking water for soup. I grabbed a spoon and tasted. Brilliant!

Flash forward to that evening. Dinner time approaches. I am seated at the kitchen table with our dog-eared copy of The Moosewood Cookbook, reacquainting myself with the recipe for one of our favorite dishes from that classic volume, "Gypsy Soup." We had flashed on this particular soup because it contains a quantity of sweet potatoes, and we had received a number of sweet potatoes in our weekly CSA box.

Sweet potatoes plus my (overcooked) greens, also from the CSA box, plus the aforementioned cooking water sounded like an amended version of Gypsy Soup. I was literally ready to start chopping onions when I noticed my wife heating up the stock pot to cook an artichoke for our daughter--that being the stock pot in which I had been saving my soup base.

"Where's the soup base?" I inquire.

My wife gives me stricken look. "Oh," she says.

"You threw out my soup base?"

Apologies. Lots of apologies.

Well, I thought that might be the end of our Accidental Gypsy Soup, what with the soup base having gone down the kitchen drain. But I adjusted. The Moosewood Cookbook suggested using stock or water in this soup. So I just used water--filtered water. It came out fine, using our CSA sweet potatoes and a few other things from the crisper drawer and the pantry.

What makes this soup are the spices and herbs: lots of paprika, turmeric, cinnamon, dried basil.

Heat 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil in the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven and add a large onion, diced medium, three medium carrots, peeled and diced, 1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced medium, and three garlic cloves, chopped fine. Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the onions begin to soften. Add 2 teaspoons paprika, 1 teaspoon turmeric, 1 teaspoon dried basil, a dash of cinnamon, a pinch of cayenne and a bay leaf and cook a few minutes longer.

Stir into the pot 1 1/2 cups cooked greens (such as kale, collards, Chinese greens) roughly chopped, 1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained, and 1 14-ounce can chickpeas, or 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas. Cover with enough stock or water to make the soup the consistency you prefer. We like ours on the thick side. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the vegetables are all cooked through, about 10 minutes.

To serve, season the soup with about 1 tablespoon tamari and ladle into warm bowls. A thick slice of crusty, whole-grain bread would be excellent with this.

Breakfast

Leftovers: sweet potato galette, greens and sauteed mushrooms.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

The sweet potato galette is delicious any time of day. The greens arrived last week in our CSA box. Typically I do not wrack my brain over how to prepare them, but simply boil all the various greens together then use them as a side dish with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar, or as an ingredient in frittatas, soups, etc.

As for the mushrooms: I am always buying more than we really need. I cook them down to keep them from going bad, then they are handy for a meal on short notice.

Dark Days: Sweet Potato Galette

A potato galette traditionally is made with standard potatoes. But I thought, Why not sweet potatoes? We love sweet potatoes--they are so nutritious and full of flavor--and we often get them in our CSA box from our farmer friend Brett. These were purchased at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market last Sunday.

To make the galette, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Coat the bottom of a well-seasoned, cast-iron skillet with extra virgin olive oil and place it over moderate heat. Peel the potatoes and slice them into thin rounds. (A mandoline makes quick work of this.) Shingle the rounds to cover the bottom of the skillet. The bottom-most potatoes will begin to cook and brown while you are assembling the rest. Between each layer, I dot the potatoes with cooked greens like these that came in our weekly CSA box.

I also like to alternate layers of cheese. I've used a soft Gorgonzola in the past. But for a strictly local galette, I bought a piece of blue goat's milk cheese from Firefly Farms in Bittinger, MD. Firefly is one of the regular vendors at the Dupont Circle market. Between each layer, after you've capped it off with more potatoes, press down very firmly with a flat object, such as a pot lid or another skillet. Then season with olive oil, salt and black pepper.

I usually continue layering the galette until the skillet is nearly filled to the top. Place in the oven and bake until the potatoes are easily pierced with a metal trussing skewer, about 20 minutes. Remove the skillet and allow the galette to cool. To remove the galette from the skillet, use a knife or spatula to cut around the edge, then invert onto a large plate or cutting board.

This galette is delicious warm or even at room temperature, and it can easily be made ahead and reheated. The sweetness of the potatoes seems to meld exceptionally well with the pungency of the cheese and the pleasant bitterness of the greens. Try it with your favorite local salad and a crisp glass of Chablis. Or if you've got a particular hankering for meat, this galette would be an ideal partner for a juicy pork roast.

Dark Days: Hungarian Sausage with Braised Red Cabbage

It's been nearly a year since we spent a weekend at our farmer friend Brett's place killing pigs and making sausages. When I went digging for something to make for this week's Dark Days meal, I found two packages of Hungarian sausages at the bottom of the freezer, transporting me back to our pork "matanza."

I like the idea of suspending grocery purchases and living off what's in the pantry--or what's in the freezer, as the case may be. Riana, at the Garlic Breath blog, has been doing just that with great success for the last several weeks. In fact, Riana is on day 40 with no end in sight. At this point, she says, "the freezer is getting bearable but not bare. At least I can see the sides and figure out what is in there."

I think we Americans have a kind of unnatural fetish when it comes to needing something different, fabulous, thrilling to eat every night. Meanwhile, food piles up uneaten. Will we ever consume those Vietnamese rice noodles in the back pantry? Or that frozen pork tenderloin I don't even remember where it came from? How about that 29-ounce can of Manning's hominy taking up space next to the Middle Eastern fava beans?

In fact, we've been pretty good the last couple of months about not blowing our budget at the grocery store. Doesn't that make the occasional "special" meal all the more "special?"

I thawed the Hungarian sausages and browned them in the cast iron skillet. There was a red cabbage from the farmers market sitting in the cold room, waiting for just such an occasion. And this week's CSA box arrived heavy with Beauregard sweet potatoes and turnips. Since the produce box also comes from Brett's farm, it created a nice bit of circularity with the year-old sausages.

As the cabbage braised, I dropped the browned sausages into the pot to cook through. I steamed the sweet potatoes in a saucepan, then seasoned them very simply with salt, allspice, nutmeg, cloves and mashed them with a pat of butter and a bit of cream.

Nothing fancy. Just good food. Crack open your best bottle of mustard and pour a nice glass of wine. And look forward to lots of leftovers.

Dark Days: Meal 2

There is always this chicken-and-egg question when shopping for the family dinner: do we approach our provisioning with a preconceived menu in mind, or do we see what the market has to offer and make our meal around that?

I went to the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday knowing exactly what I wanted: a big, ripe chicken to roast on my charcoal spit. The sides for this meal were still a bit vague, but I was sure I would find something in the teeming morass of vegetable vendors.

Sure enough, at one of the vegetable stands I noticed cartons of okra, still fresh and alert. This has to be the last okra of the season. And though I think this is cheating a bit (okra hardly being "dark days" food--more like August), I thought, Why don't we just save the turnips for later?

Then I spied these big, glorious sweet potatoes and a summery menu began to take shape: fried okra and sweet potato salad. Now all I needed was that chicken, down at the Eco-Friendly food stall at the other end of the market. I made a beeline for the poultry coolers, but all I saw were breasts and miscellaneous pieces. A dark cloud of dread began to form over my well-laid plans.

"We didn't have any whole chickens to bring this week," said one of the salesmen, apparently reading my mind. "But we do have these poussins," and he directed my gaze to a display of little immature chickens--les poussins. Too small for the charcoal spit. But fine for roasting in the oven. My plans would not be completely thwarted.

So here you see my take on Meal 2, Halloween Week. Call it the last of the summer menus: Oven-roasted poussin with a sage-garlic rub, fried okra and sweet potato salad with toasted pecans and a orange-maple syrup dressing.

In other words, I will continue with whatever summer leavings the farmers market has to offer, until the November winds blow us right into fall.

Sweet Potato Salad

Clipping recipes can be like fishing. Many of the recipes you tear out of food magazines may look good at first, but turn out to be not worth the effort. But every once in a while you hook one that's a real keeper.

So it was with this sweet potato salad I've adapted from a recipe I found in Bon Appetit. I don't subscribe any more--some magazines just try too hard to be ahead of the latest trend. But being turned on to sweet potatoes prepared this way was worth the price of admission.

First, sweet potatoes are extremely healthy. A typical sweet potato contains only 95 calories, but is rich in Vitamins A and C in the form of beta-carotene, as well iron, dietary fiber and several other vital minerals. Plus it has a pleasing sweetness that sets it apart from regular potatoes and partners so well with other interesting ingredients, as you soon shall see.

Sweet potatoes are true root tubers, unlike the standard potato, which is actually a swollen stem. This year I am trying to grow sweet potatoes at the Washington Youth Garden as part of my chef residency. The plants I bought arrived in the mail all shriveled and looking nearly dead. But I was told they were tough little plants and would revive and they sure enough did. But now the deer have found the leaves too tasty. I'm not sure what the end result will be.

My grandmother made sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving by slicing them into chunks and smothering them in butter and brown sugar. Baked in the oven, they were incredibly dense and sweet, more like dessert, more like a confection. I think those are the kind of sweet potatoes most people remember (sometimes under a layer of marshmallows!)--and often reject. They can be achingly sweet and cloying prepared that way.

Instead, I like to peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into one-inch dice, toss them with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper and bake them in a 350-degree oven until just tender. You can dress them any way you like at this point and they retain just their natural level of sweetness, which is enough for most people.

Or, you can treat sweet potatoes as a salad ingredient, as in this recipe. For 10 servings, peel 3 pounds of sweet potatoes. Cut the potatoes into 1-inch cubes, toss with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper and spread on one or two baking sheets. Bake in a 350-degree oven until just tender (I poke them with a metal trussing skewer to test for doneness).

While the sweet potatoes are baking, prepare the dressing. Whisk together 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, 2 tablespoons maple syrup, 2 tablespoons orange juice, 2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg. Set aside.

When the sweet potatoes are cooked through, remove from the oven to cool. Meanwhile, toast 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans. In a large bowl, toss together the sweet potatoes, the toasted pecans, 1/2 cup chopped scallions, 1/2 cup chopped parsley, 1/4 cup golden raisins and 1/4 cup dark raisins. Stir in enough dressing to coat lightly.

The salad can be made ahead and refrigerated. Serve at room temp.

This sweet potato salad is a perfect summer side dish with grilled chicken, pork or barbeque. We served it with stuffed hamburgers for Fourth of July. We never tire of making it and people always ask for the recipe.