Mashed sweet potatoes have a distinctly different taste from your everyday mashed potatoes. Yep, you guessed it: they’re sweeter. They’re also much more delicate so they require a slightly different approach; namely, you steam them instead of boiling them.
For this recipe, I used three different sweet potatoes/yams, only because we had all three at the house. This recipe will work fine with almost any sweet tuber, although admittedly this dish looks pretty awesome with all three.
NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
There are several types of chinese cabbage out there in the wide wide world (or your local supermarket), so let’s learn them real quick. Won bok (“napa” cabbage) is the large, football-shaped heads of cabbage that are used in making kimchee. Bok choy resembles celery but with large green leaves (as seen above). Lastly, choy sum is the inner core of bok choy, with narrow, green stalks. Now that the hard stuff is out of the way, here’s how to steam bok choy for an interesting and nutritious side dish.
Boiling potatoes for anything other than the purpose of mashing them may seem insane, but with certain potatoes it results in an evenly cooked potato with a mild taste – provided you cook them perfectly. Fingerling potatoes are perfect for boiling because it brings out their subtle, nutty flavor.
No burger should go without fries. Unfortunately, making fries at home is a mildly infuriating process, because each cooking method has serious flaws. Frying them on a stovetop can produce excellent results but uses a lot of precious oil. Reducing the oil produces uneven results and dried out potatoes. Baking them in the oven generally results in either soggy or crispy-beyond-belief potatoes. I set out to find a better oven fries recipe to save on oil costs as well as the messy, tedious work of frying potatoes in batches. I found one through Cook’s Illustrated that works well, and with a few modifications, is also Paleo-friendly.
This recipe is unique in that you cover the fries with tinfoil for the first few minutes to steam them. Also, you add salt and pepper to the pan BEFORE adding the potatoes, which actually works to keep the fries from sticking to the pan as well as evenly coating them.
I spent some time in Prague last year and was introduced to česnečka (pronounced “chesnechka”), which is a simple garlic and potato soup.
I found that the soup tasted best with a mixture of my homemade beef stock, beef broth, and water. If you don’t have access to all three (my guess is you have easy access to one), improvise as needed.
I’ve probably read about this somewhere, but the other day I decided to try and use cauliflower instead of rice, and I was surprised by the results: the texture was similar, and I couldn’t taste any cauliflower in the dish at all (and we used an entire head for about four servings).
The Domestic Man 