Later this afternoon my cousin I. and her husband W. will be dropping in at my mother’s before visiting the cemetery. I may go over there myself and have a slice of cake and a coffee with them. We’ll see.
The food experiment yesterday revolved around … spuds! That’s right: potatoes. I tried out a gratin with the regular variety and for the first time used sweet potatoes to make a creamy mash.
I started out with the gratin. I used some ‘patattes des Sables’ from the Somme Bay in Northern France. They are not the recommended variety to make a gratin but I thought that I would give it a try anyway, slicing the tiny potatoes into very thin slices, without peeling them first. I put them in a shallow ramekin, added some pepper, salt and freshly grated nutmeg. Next a poured a boiling 50/50 mixture of milk and cream over them.
The gratin, before I put it in the oven.
After 50 minutes at 180°C it they came out steaming-hot,
golden-brown and utterly delicious.
golden-brown and utterly delicious.
I put the ramekins in my oven which I had pre-heated to 180°C. While these were bubbling away, I peeled four yams, cut them into big chunks and boiled them in slightly salted water. When they were done, I mashed them and stirred in some knobs of salted butter. Next I transfered them to this mini cooking pot and put them in the oven with the gratin just to keep warm.
A mash of sweet potatoes - a first, yet very satisfying experiment!
I served this potato-duo with ‘tomates farcies’ – tomatoes stuffed with a pork-mince.
My mother, who’s very suspicious when it comes to eating something new, mistook the yams for carrots. And she really liked them! And she liked them even more when I told her that it was the same thing Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone with the Wind’ dug out of the ground at Tara in the emotional scene where she swears to God that she would never let her family go hungry again.
Like me – well it’s probably the other way round – my mother is a big fan of ‘Gone with the wind’. She saw the film for the first time in 1957 when she was pregnant with me. She liked it so much that sat in the cinema for two consecutive sessions … eating her sandwich lunch during the intermission. I suppose it must have left an everlasting impact on me too, as I just can’t get enough of it …
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2 comments:
Hello Martine,
As I understand it those yams are not yams at all but, as you said, sweet potatoes. The same confusion happen also here in the States. They call the white sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes and the orange sweet potatoes, yams for some obscure reason. Yams and sweet potatoes are two completely different plants.
Anyway, the best way to cook sweet potatoes is to baked them. That way they retain all the vitamins that would be otherwise diluted in water and lost.
You wrap them in aluminum paper, shiny side inside [en papillottes], but don't forget to prick them before with a fork or a knife in different places. You bake them on a cookie sheet for an hour at 200°C [400°F]. Let them cool off completely. Peeling, then, is very easy if a little messy. I cook red beets the same way and it works fine.
Chm, Thank you for pointing out the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. That cooking/baking tip is very useful too. I'll certainly make orange sweet patatoes again. I won't try the red beets, though, because I don't like them. :)
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