Book Club Bites: Sweet Potato Flowers

What was your first fine dining “wow” moment? Perhaps it was a duck confit, made from a recipe that hasn’t changed in generations. Or an elaborate 30-component dessert. Or a simple bite of the world’s best ingredients.

In Food Whore, Tia's eyes are opened by a simple amuse bouche: a sweet potato flower with sesame-honey stamens.

Unlike some of the other dishes in Food Whore, which are based on real-life dishes I’ve seen or eaten, this one came entirely from my imagination. I’m no restaurant chef, and if you’re making this as a snack for your friends or family, you probably don’t want to spend restaurant-level time on this. So here’s my at-home version of Tia’s fine dining bite. The inside is soft, while the ends are crisp like chips. If you’re timing this to the book -- this dish appears in Chapter 11!

INGREDIENTS

sweet potatoes (this recipe will make enough seasoning for 4-5 potatoes, but you can make fewer)
1 egg
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons paprika
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
¼ teaspoon onion powder
¼ teaspoon cayenne

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Slice the sweet potatoes very thinly, preferably with a mandolin (I used the 1.3mm setting). On a non-stick baking sheet, fan 7 sweet potato slices into a circle.

In a bowl, mix egg, oil, salt, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder and cayenne. Mix well then dab onto the sweet potatoes with a silicone brush (or even your fingers) until evenly covered. Make sure sure to get where the slices meet, too.

Place in oven and bake for 12-14 minutes, or until the slices are slightly golden and very pliable. Remove from the the oven, then raise heat to 400 degrees.

Once cool enough to handle, pick up the circle and detach two of the slices so you have a broken circle. From one end, curl the perimeter of the circle, holding at the base and letting the top fan outwards like petals. Use two toothpicks in an X shape to secure the bottom.

Once you’re done, replace all your flowers on the baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 5 minutes, or until the ends of the flower “petals” are crisp. Remove and let cool. Before serving, remove toothpicks. 

Sweet Potato Roasted with Coconut

This is more hefty than a snack, more slight than a meal. And that's a good thing. 

On Tuesday nights I go to a writing workshop and leave the house around 6:45. I probably could eat a full diner, but I don't want to be too full during class. I also don't want my hunger to distract me. (I've never been the type of person who can just "forget to eat". What? My whole day revolves around eating.) 

So the other day I made this as a pre-class snack -- one sweet potato, roasted with coconut oil, topped with Maldon sea salt and coconut flakes. Like these soy-mirin-sesame glazed yams, this is a lovely blend of sweet and savory. I was inspired by coconut curries with starchy potatoes, yams, butternut squash. Maybe next time I'll make this with curry, but not before class. It's one thing to stain your own writing with curried fingers. Quite another to stain your classmate's. 

RECIPE: Preheat toaster oven to 450 degrees. Prick sweet potato with fork, slice into rounds, and rub with coconut oil. Roast for 15-20 minutes, or until a fork can easily slip into the slices. Sprinkle with coconut flakes and sea salt. 

Sesame Soy Mirin-Glazed Korean Yams

Let us now praise that trinity of sauces. Sesame. Soy sauce. Mirin. 

Sesame oil! Fragrant, nutty. Instantly recognizable. The base note. 

Soy sauce! Salt with umami. The mid-note.

Mirin! Sweet, with a ricey mouthfeel. The top note. 

Add it on Korean yams, and you have one of my favorite snacks. I like to keep roasted sweet potatoes on hand for carby snacking. If you do that, then making this is just one easy step away. It's sweet, savory, earthy. I personally like Korean yams for this because they are dryer and nuttier than sweet potatoes (which are, comparatively, wet, sweet). Think chestnuts over pumpkin. 

RECIPE: Wash, pierce, and roast Korean yams in 400 degree oven for 35 minutes, or until a fork can easily be slipped in with just slight resistance (you don't want it too mushy). Remove from oven and slice along the length, about 3/4 of the way to the bottom. Mix 2 parts soy sauce, 1 part mirin, 1 part sesame oil. Add some rice vinegar, too, to lighten it up. Pour on top of yams, making sure to get in the cracks. Roast for another 10 minutes, until glaze has infused. 

Highly recommend eating with fingers, dragging the pieces through the residual sauce. 

Poached Egg and Purple Rice in a Collard Green Cup

Do you remember Fatty Crab in its hey day? Now Zak Pelaccio is cooking in Hudson, NY at Fish + Game (been there too, but very different), but back in the day, man that food was good.

nasi lemak at Fatty Crab (photo by travelchictv)

At Fatty Crab he had this insane nasi lemak -- coconut rice, chicken curry, slow poached egg, spicy pickles, deep-fried shallots, dried anchovies, various sambals. It remains one of the best restaurant dishes I've ever tasted. So much texture and funk and heat. Salty, sour, sweet, smooth, spiky. It was all there, a riot of bright, alpha flavors somehow sharing the stage in this dish. 

This is a bit of my homage... a petite chamber orchestra compared to Pelaccio's carnival. The depth comes from caramelized shallots, tucked in the sticky and sweet purple rice. Add a poached egg and a dash of salt, and you have a slippery savory little bite. Could it use some pickles, sambals, dried fish, fried garlic slices, etc? Yes, indeed. This is just a start.

RECIPE: 

Caramelize shallots by sautéing with olive oil and salt on low for 30 minutes (I had them from another recipe so it wasn't so bad). Make sticky purple rice according to instructions (The one I used was about 75% white rice that the purple rice stained. Best to stick with your rice's instructions since rice ratios may change).

Lay collard green leaves in the bottom of a poach pod. Mix shallots with rice and add to the bottom of the pod. Crack an egg into a shallow bowl, then add to top of poach pod. Gently place poach pod into a small pot of boiling water, making sure that water doesn't reach the top of the poach pod. If your poach pod is slanted because of uneven weight distribution, prop it up with a random kitchen utensil. I used a spoon. Cover the pot and cook for 5 minutes. Remove pouch from poach pod, sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve. 

Avocado Toast with Turmeric Eggs and Sumac

Let's talk about texture and the Instagram friend that follows us all: avocado toast. 

Growing up, the only time we ate avocado was for dessert. My Madagascar-born mom made avocado mashed with coarse raw sugar and dark rum. It was pasty yet grainy, like a boozy, moisturizing exfoliant for the tongue. 

You can pretty much put anything on avocado toast: something crunchy, something sweet, something fishy, something herby, something pickled. 

But my favorite is plush-on-plush, smooth-on-smooth. Egg on avocado has an echoing sensation on your teeth. And if you're looking for more avocado (and a different texture), then you know what to make for dessert. 

RECIPE:
Turmeric-Stained Egg: Fill a 1/2-quart saucepan with water and place the egg inside. When the water has reached a boil, turn off heat and let the egg sit for 10 minutes. Remove the egg and peel it. Stir 2 heaping tablespoons of turmeric to the water (be careful --- it will stain your counter, your hands, your cutting board You can get it out, but it's a bit of a pain). Add the egg back to the saucepan and let sit for 3 minutes. 

I won't insult you with the assembly. Mash, slice, place, sprinkle (sumac and salt). Done! 

More of my avocado recipes here.

Strawberry Snack Mix

Necessity is the mother of invention. Or annoyance. Or disappointment.

FreshDirect, as you may know, makes a trail mix they call Rainbow Delight. It's raisins, peanuts, sunflower seeds, cashews, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and of course -- the source of the rainbow -- M&M-like candy.

Due to a shortage of some sort, there was a period of time when some bags, packed in some factory, replaced the rainbow candies with plain chocolate chips.

Oh. No.

So while we wrote to customer service and waited out the great rainbow drought of 2013 (the M&Ms have since been re-instituted), I made my own snack mix.

It doesn't have a name yet, but it's red. It's sweet and salty and -- something relatively new to the snack mix game -- a little squishy.

So what's in it? It's a mix of unsalted cashews, chocolate-covered raisins (I also tried blueberries, but raisins are more than sufficient), dried cranberries, salted peanuts, and freeze-dried strawberries.

It's a summery snack mix and sort of sexy, too.

I know this is true because recently in Paris I found that Pierre Hermé had his own version, based on his famous Ispahan rose-raspberry-litchi macaron.

His version is a little more refined, but that's not always what you want in your pre-meeting food grab.

Chocolate Mint Kasha Buttons

The other day, I had a cupcake with wheatberry buttercream frosting. I made a joke that it doesn't seem possible. What's next, quinoa fudge.

And then I remembered this guy, which I made as a gift for someone who loves chocolate and mint. The crunch is similar to that of a Crunch bar, but with a bit of farminess to it, a taste of the soil along with the cooling green of the mint.

I added the tiniest bit of peppermint extract into melted chocolate, then mixed with the kasha. You can change it up with other small cereals of varying processing -- puffed wheat, Smacks. More chocolate for a bon-bon. More kasha for something like a granola bar.

I molded the chocolates in this mysterious porcelain tray I got from Fish's Eddy. The leaf adds something of a fern-in-a-fossil effect, which I may want to continue if I pursue this ancient grain-chocolate thing.