Fried Sweet Potato Cake

If you’ve ever had Japanese mochi, you’ve had sweet rice flour.  (It’s also called glutinous flour, but celiacs need not worry — glutinous refers to the fact that it’s sticky; gluten-containing flours/grains, on the other hand, are glutenous.)  Aside from mochi, though, Americans rarely use sticky rice flour in any recipes.  Most of the time, I don’t, either, because it’s so darned sticky that it doesn’t work well in standard situations.  If you heat it at all, you’re looking at one heckuva sticky mess, such as the time I attempted to make roux with sticky rice flour and wound up with a clumped ball instead.  Oops…

But that tackiness sure does come in handy when you want to make a Cambodian fried cake!  I’ve modified this idea to make a crepe-like snack that doesn’t require nearly as much precious ghee or time as a rounded one would.  The sticky rice flour provides perfect stretchability for a crunchy/soft spiced treat!

Cambodian Fried Sweet Potato Cake (gluten-free)

1 lb. sweet potatoes, either canned or freshly simmered and then mashed (1″ cubes usually take about 10 minutes of simmering to soften them)
1 1/4 cups sticky rice flour
1 T. curry powder
About 1″ section of peeled and freshly-minced ginger root or 1 tsp. of dried ginger
Ghee or coconut oil

Mix potatoes with flour and spices, using your hands if necessary. (Scrunching the dough together with your fingers is more fun than using a spoon!) Dough will be very sticky and soft. You may need to coat your hands with a bit of additional flour to separate the dough into at least 12 equal pieces and then smush each one into a flat disk. Stacking them onto pieces of wax paper helps, especially if you’d like to only make half the cakes and save the remainder of the dough for later. (You can refrigerate the dough for 4-5 days.)

Fry the individual cakes in ghee or coconut oil over medium heat, adding enough fat to cover the surface of the dough. (The flatter the cake, the less cooking fat you’ll need; also, choose a pan that just fits the cake so that the cooking fat is snuggled right up against the cake’s edges rather than trickling off to the sides and being wasted.) Depending on how thin the cake is, it may brown in 3 minutes or fewer, so keep a close eye on it. As soon as the bottom side is golden brown, flip over and cook the other side, again cooking until the surface is golden to medium brown.

Remove from pan and let drain on paper towel while you make the next cake. These tasty cakes are best served warm/hot, so feel free to briefly reheat them if necessary.

Enjoy!

Roasted Vegetable Salad with Corn, Snap Peas, Red Pepper & Sweet Potatoes

As much as I adore fresh, raw ingredients in my salads, sometimes I think roasting veggies makes them taste even better.  There’s something about that slow-cooked, vaguely-carmelized flavor that makes a roasted salad explode on my tongue in an ever-so-smooth kind of way.  And such salads are ridiculously easy to make — the veggies themselves are so pronounced and satisfying that you don’t even need to add dressing.  Just remove them from the oven, let cool slightly, and toss together.  The only thing you might want to add is a sharp, piquant cheese like sheep’s-milk Feta or a soft goat cheese.  Trust me, your dinner guests will think this is the best salad they’ve ever had!

Roasted Vegetable Salad

You can use any kind of vegetable you’d like — with the glaring exception of delicate greens, vegetables roast well.  Just be sure to put them in separate pans so that you can remove them as they’re done (different vegetables and different shapes have different cooking times).  I often use several pie pans since I can fit five or six 9″ ones into the oven at once.  Something long and slender, for example (green beans, green onions, or asparagus) is going to cook more quickly than something more dense and starchy (potatoes, turnips, or parsnips).  Separating veggies individually or by type will make it much easier for you to cook them to the doneness that you like best.

Get the oven heating to about 350 degrees F, then clean and slice veggies in whatever way you’d like.  Some — like cherry tomatoes or small- to medium-sized Brussels sprouts — you may wish to leave whole.  Kernels of corn roast beautifully (fresh or frozen); so do peas and carrots and onions and almost anything else you can think of.

Place your veggies into their separate pans or trays.  Toss with  melted butter (or coconut oil), sea salt, and freshly-cracked pepper.  Turn each piece to make sure it’s coated in oil and spices.

Bake for about 30 minutes before checking in on your veggies.  At this point, very slender cuts may be done; starchier or thicker-cut veggies may only be halfway there (or less).  It’s best to open the oven, pull out a rack, and stir the veggies with a wooden spoon so that you can get a really good look at them and determine how done they are.  In my experience, corn, snap peas, peppers, and onions take about the same amount of time, but again, that depends on how you cut the latter two.  After that 30-minute mark, keep checking your veggies every 15 minutes to gauge their progress.  Note that after you’ve done this once or twice, you’ll have a much better idea of how long things will take.

When veggies are done to your satisfaction, simply remove from oven, toss together, and serve.  You may want to add some Feta or goat cheese directly to the mix or let each diner add her own.

Enjoy!

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Garlic

Although grocery shoppers in the United States use “sweet potatoes” and “yams” interchangeably, yams are actually unrelated tropical tubers.  They’re paler and more crisp than what we think of as yams/sweet potatoes.  You’ll probably stumble across true yams if you’re in a mercado in Latin America, but if you’re State-side, even the canned “yams” are actually sweet potatoes.

In this case, however, I’ll stick to the Gershwin logic of “You say potay-to, I say potah-to / You say tomay-to, I say tomah-to” because sweet potatoes are delicious no matter what they’re called.  And with the high levels of beta-carotene characteristic of orange-colored fruits and vegetables (our bodies convert beta-carotene to vitamin A), sweet potatoes make for a much better side dish than the standard, old-fashioned mashed potatoes.  For a real treat, though, try roasting them with garlic as I’ve done here.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.  While it’s heating, peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into rounds.  Arrange them in a baking dish that’s big enough to hold them all without crowding, then drizzle them with ghee (clarified butter), coconut oil, or palm oil (unlike unsaturated fats, saturated fats can handle high temperatures without breaking down and oxidizing).  Salt and pepper the rounds and then swirl them in the pan to make sure that all the pieces are covered with oil.

Roast for 15 minutes, stirring the potatoes once during that time to ensure even cooking.  Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine a clove or two of garlic (figure one clove per sweet potato) with another tablespoon or two of ghee/oil.  When the 15 minutes are up, drizzle the garlic oil over the sweet potatoes, moving them around again to distribute the oil equally.  Roast for an additional 10 minutes.  Do not overcook–the garlic will burn and become bitter.

Enjoy!