I love a good hearty soup in the winter time. This year I tried a new soup–White Bean, Sweet Potato and Tasso Soup. The inspiration for this recipe is a Cuban soup and comes from a tiny restaurant featuring International foods in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. With spring arriving; I need to get this recipe post done.
Are you looking for a sweet potato recipe for Thanksgiving? I recommend Ruth’s Chris Special Sweet Potato Casserole. It is a traditional Louisiana recipe with a praline topping and a filling made with fresh baked sweet potatoes. The rich, creamy filling includes a special ingredient. It is served in Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurants around the world.
The recipe is from Ruth Fertel. She is the original owner of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, an upscale restaurant in New Orleans which is now a world-wide chain. That is an interesting story itself. Continue reading
Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup is soothing to the soul and body. My soup is healthy, too, full of aromatic root vegetables—carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips, rutabaga and onions–available in autumn. I’m taking the easy route to making the home-cooked broth by using rotisserie chickens; these will make a flavorful stock which is essential to good soup.
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Katrina was a hurricane like no other one. We are used to high winds, trees down, power outages, localized flooding. This one flooded an entire city — New Orleans. Families lost everything–homes, possessions and yes, treasured recipes. This blog post is about a recipe book, “Cooking Up A Storm,” and finding lost recipes after Katrina. A post-script story gives an eclectic recollection of my Katrina memories and photos.
My husband has been making sales calls in the coastal areas of Louisiana during the past couple of weeks. He mentioned that it was fascinating to see the sugarcane harvest in progress which is in full swing in October and November. I decided write this week’s blog post about Louisiana sugarcane.
While searching through my stack of recipe ideas, I came across a newspaper recipe for Sweet Potato Biscuits. That sounded interesting and a good way to use some of my sweet potatoes. Plus, the nutritional benefits of sweet potatoes are many–especially rich in Vitamin C and A. I added fresh chives and parsley from my garden for flavor. The adapted recipe turned out great, although there were a few challenges.
Read on to see a couple of suggestions when making biscuits… Continue reading
I bought a sack of Louisiana-grown sweet potatoes a couple of weeks ago, and now need to find many ways to cook them. Fortunately, sweet potatoes are versatile, lending their use to a wide variety of recipes from desserts to side dishes and even biscuits (the subject of a future post). They are relatively bland and can be combined with many seasonings–I even found a recipe for curried shrimp-sweet potato soup which sounded interesting.
My favorite way to prepare sweet potatoes is simply to bake them. It’s easy, fool-proof and tasty. Given the wide range of flavors that go along with sweet potatoes, I also like to stuff the baked sweet potatoes with an assortment of ingredients. The possibilities are endless.
Yes, sweet potatoes grow in Louisiana. A bit of trivia, according to the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission, Louisiana grows more sweet potatoes that any other state except North Carolina. I doubt if sweet potatoes will grow in my garden which consists of hard clay. However, much of the central and western parts of rural Louisiana have sandy, loamy soil. Sweet potatoes need a long growing season making this a good geographical area for farming sweet potatoes.
I purchased a sack of sweet potatoes from a man who brings produce from central Louisiana to sell from his truck by the side of the road. He’s been at this spot for several years, and his produce varies according to the time of the year. These sweet potatoes came from a farm in Bunkie, Louisiana. The variety is Beauregard sweet potatoes, developed for better crop resistance and it is the most common one grown in the state. This variety is softer and sweeter than the variety grown in northern states–which tends to be drier and more mealy.
Some recipes call for sweet potatoes and others for yams. Technically, all are sweet potatoes. When the softer, more orange and sweeter variety was introduced into the South, these were given the name, yams, to differentiate the two types. Yams reminded the slaves of the tubers they remembered from African or, “”nyami”. Yams are grown in Central and South American and can be found in specialty markets.
Source: http://www.sweetpotato.org/content/about-us
The sweet potatoes sold by this road-side vendor were moderately small ones; just right for a serving when baked. I plan to make several of my favorite recipes and post them here.
beyondgumbo 