"sweet potato" news and stories

As fall gets underway, do you know the difference between a sweet potato and a yam? The subject of much confusion, the orange-colored tuber that is often referred to as a "yam" is in fact, a sweet potato.

This potato fritter looks, in our humble opinion, exactly as a potato fritter should.

It's crispy around the edges with little shreds of potato and sweet potato trailing seductively from a perfectly golden brown, tender center. It sort of reminds us of the sun, or, less abstractly, of what we'd like to be eating right now. The fact that this fritter's creator, Molly Watson of The Dinner Files, originally intended for this to be a potato latke makes us love it even more.

We know the pain and sorrow of potato latkes -- indeed, our mother's first and only attempt to make the starchy little devils resulted in an unscheduled visit from the fire department -- so we can sympathize with the myriad frustrations Ms. Watson describes on her blog. And we can also relate to the unexpected joys of happy kitchen accidents that yield gorgeous fritters like this one, particularly if they're accompanied by a few spoonfuls of applesauce or tangy Greek yogurt. So please, go fritter some time away -- yes, we went there -- with Molly.

[Via The Dinner Files]

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Got a killer original sweet potato recipe? Well, post it to your blog and you could bag a more-than-sweet $1,000 prize. The North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission has just announced their 2009 Bloggers' Recipe Challenge. The $1,000 prize will be awarded to the creator of the winning recipe; five finalists will win $100 prizes.

Check out the instructions, directly from the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission, after the jump.

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Seriously? Sweet potato and cheese cookies? That's what I thought when I saw this recipe too. But Dawn from Vanilla Sugar swears by them, and I'm inclined to believe her. I've always thought that the cheddar cheese + pie combo was highly underrated, so I can see how the sweet and savory flavors would work together much the same way in these cookies. Plus, since cheese has protein, you can eat the cookies for breakfast. Right? The recipe includes mashed sweet potatoes, shredded sharp cheddar, cinnamon, pecans and raisins. I won't have a chance to test these out myself until the weekend, so if anyone else tries them, please let me know how they taste!

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For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.

I'm loving this star-themed bento, thrown together from fridge leftovers, from Catdraco on the Live Journal bento site. We've got cukes with stars cut out of the center, filled with same-shaped sweet potatos. The noodles are rice vermicelli, and there are tofu cubes with soy and sesame oil. The car is a hard-boiled egg.

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