Sweet Potatoes

Man, the restaurant life really sapped my enthusiasm for cooking! My love for the kitchen, even to this day, has not recovered and I retired from the business five and a half years ago. I used to think nothing of spending joyful hours in the kitchen, but now there are days when I can barely be bothered to go back in the kitchen for two minutes to throw together a ham sandwich.

Kitchen Mojo: Sweet Potato Cakes, Pork Tenderloin, Cole Slaw, Chipotle Honey

Just after retirement from the restaurant, I had no love for the kitchen. But these days some five-plus years hence, my love of cooking comes and goes. In the last ten days or so, my kitchen mojo is finally on the wax, at least temporarily. That's a good thing in that I have accumulated of a bit of winter fat and I need to eat better. Also, my body is longing for fresh vegetables, something that it quite usual for me in this cold vegetable-challenged season. That longing in part spurs me to action in the kitchen.

Though many vegetables are now available 365 days a year, thanks to a worldwide supply chain, old habits die hard with me. I try to use ingredients only in season, though I have relented a bit from this imperative in recent years. Back in the restaurant days, as a seasonal restaurant supplied by local farmers, we were limited in winter to storage vegetables from the previous growing season, our farmers bringing us only the tiniest amount of fresh produce from their expensive-to-heat greenhouses.

Winter therefore meant sweet potatoes, bushels and bushels of sweet potatoes. Out of necessity, we had to find creative ways to use them so as not to bore ourselves or customers. Fortunately, the sweet potato is as equally useful as a regular potato and therefore lends itself to a myriad of preparations: boiled, mashed, baked, chips, fries, grated for latkes, and even hashed.

Exercising all my creativity, at one point during my restaurant career, I hit upon a sweet potato hash that quickly became a customer favorite when accompanying our Berkshire x Ossabaw pork, wild boar, Moulard duck, or any of the venison that would come and go on the menu throughout the course of the winter: red deer, white tail, caribou, or elk.

The hash at the restaurant would have started in a vast sauté pan with cubes of our slab bacon, or house-cured pancetta if we were between slabs of bacon, cooked just enough to release a bit of fat. Into the sauté pan would go diced onion and cubes of raw sweet potato. Like any hash, it would stay on the flame until the bacon was rendered, the onions browned, and the sweet potato cooked all the way through.

I have never been one to like sweet food (I'm that guy who does not eat dessert) and I have always frowned on sweet sweet potato preparations. Properly cured sweet potatoes have enough natural sweetness on their own that they really don't need any added sugar, except perhaps if they are being served as a dessert course. But I do make a slight exception for my sweet potato hash.

Just as the hash is cooked is where the sweetness comes in, though not via added sugar (at least not raw sugar). At this point, we'd add dried sweetened cranberries (or cherries) and then flambé the whole shebang with a good slug of Bourbon. Ann is not a fan of the sweet woody and vanilla notes that the Bourbon imparts nor has she ever been a fan of fruit in savory dishes. But this hash ticks my boxes: creative, savory, smoky, and oh so tasty.  For more on the hash technique see here and here.

I have finally got enough distance from the restaurant and its sea of winter sweet potatoes to want to prepare sweet potatoes again at home. So, to accompany a roast pork tenderloin, I made this hash again, omitting the bacon to keep the dish a bit healthier. In spite of Ann not being a big fan, every once in a while, I make a dish because I like it. My usual MO is to only cook the things that I know that Ann loves. Mea culpa.

I actually cooked two tenderloins and put the second one in the fridge along with a small amount of leftover hash, the perfect starting point for a leftover-based dish the next evening. But how to change it up so that it would be different enough from the night before? I didn't have enough hash left to serve one person, let alone two, so I thought about ways to stretch it. And it occurred to me that if I roasted a sweet potato, mashed it, and incorporated the leftover hash into the mash, I could make sweet potato cakes.

I find myself using rolled oats instead of bread crumbs or panko to bind things these days: meatloaf, meatballs, potato cakes, and so forth. The results are fantastic and to my mind, at least, the complex carbs in rolled oats are a healthier option than the more simple bread carbs. Although I put a little panko on the surface of the sweet potato cakes to yield a nice crust, I bound the cakes with oats.

Sweet Potato Cakes, Bound with Rolled Oats

Once I had made the sweet potato cakes and put them in the refrigerator to set up, the full dish came together in my mind: sweet potato cakes, thinly sliced pork tenderloin, a bit of my vinegar-based cole slaw that is always in the fridge, and a drizzle of spicy chipotle-honey (chipotle purée, honey, water to thin, and salt to taste).

At least temporarily, my kitchen mojo is back and functioning at a decent level and I'm still making good use of winter storage vegetables: sweet potatoes, onions, cabbage, and carrots. And Ann is going to forgive my use of sweet dried fruit and Bourbon in the sweet potato cakes.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions on Sweet Potato Hash

Yesterday was a blah, chilly, mainly cloudy, slightly rainy day and a very good day to be inside. These are the kinds of days when I need to get in the kitchen and cook to relieve the sense of having been a slug for the day. In short, it was a good day to make something a little more involved for dinner.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions on Sweet Potato Hash

My restaurant was highly seasonal with menus changing each day depending on the ingredients our farmers, fisherman, and foragers had found for us. Because of this, our winter and early spring menus were of necessity creative to make good use of the storage vegetables on which we depended.

One of those storage vegetables that we always had in vast quantities was sweet potatoes. Out of necessity, we came up with a sweet potato hash to accompany a wide variety of proteins, and I decided to reprise a version of that hash at home last night. This hash is diced sweet potatoes, onions, and dried cherries, flavored with a touch of garlic and then flambéed with Bourbon.

Start with Raw Sweet Potatoes and Onions

To start the hash, cook the raw sweet potatoes and onions until the sides are a bit browned and the sweet potatoes are just tender. At the restaurant, we might have started with cubes of slab bacon before adding the veggies or we might have added cubed pork belly after the veggies were cooked. For a vegan dish, we would have proceeded just as I did last evening. We might have even added Cajun-spiced pecans to the hash once it was done. This idea is just that, an idea from which to launch your imagination.

Flaming the Hash with Bourbon

Once the vegetables were cooked, I added a bit of minced garlic and a handful of dried cherries. Once the garlic started smelling really good, I added a shot of Bourbon and tilted the pan towards the flame to light it. The hash is quite savory from the onions and garlic, yet it gets a touch of sweetness from the sweet potatoes and cherries and a hint of oaky vanilla from the Bourbon. This sweet profile really resonates with pork and duck, and even gamier meats such as elk, caribou/reindeer, or venison.

Pork Tenderloin Medallions

Pork tenderloin is inexpensive and so super simple to cook that it should be a go-to protein in your refrigerator. It takes seconds to remove the little piece of silverskin from the head end and mere seconds more to cut it into say one-inch segments. Turn the segments on end and flatten them gently with your palm and after a good dose of salt, they're ready for the pan in which they will cook very quickly, perhaps two minutes on one side and another minute on the flip side.

To finish the plating, I wilted some spinach and placed it between the hash and the pork on the plate. A drizzle of honey and a sprinkle of smoked salt finished the dish. At the restaurant, we might have topped the pork with a few fern fiddleheads, a pat of toasted pecan compound butter, or even a drizzle of chipotle honey, the spice working well with the sweetness of the dish.

This is one of those super simple dishes that you can use to impress people. They never need to know how easy it is to make. And it makes a great springboard for your imagination to morph it into many other kinds of dishes.

Inauguration Day Cocktails and Cheese Puffs

Our heads are still reeling from the rabid mobs swarming and wreaking havoc on the Capitol on the 6th and the fact that our president incited that riot. Ann and I are fed up with such shameful behavior and were so looking forward to the inauguration of a new president yesterday, that we decided to have cocktails and hors d'oeuvres to celebrate what hopefully will be a transition back to more sane behavior in the White House.

Cheese Puffs and Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

Earlier in the week, I had made chicken pot pie and had some leftover pie crust. I knew that I was going to use the pie crust to make an hors d'oeuvre for our little celebration. Then it dawned on me to convert that pie crust to a laminated pastry (puff pastry) with cheddar cheese to bake into cheese puffs to accompany our cocktails.

Cheese Puffs

Although I never went to culinary school, I taught myself everything (and a lot more) that these schools have to teach, including pastry basics. Throughout my chef career, I made a lot of puff pastry (though you can buy it frozen easily in the trade). There's not a whole lot of difference between my pie crust and puff pastry, except that the pie crust is not laminated.

Lamination is the key to puff pastry: folding and refolding it into layers upon layers as you can see in the photo above. Generally, you start with a basic pastry and seal that around a hunk of butter (the process called beurrage). Then you roll the dough out, trifold it, rotate it 90 degrees, roll it out, trifold it again, then let it rest in the refrigerator for 45 minutes to an hour. You do this once or twice more, building layers and layers.

I decided to put a mound of shredded cheddar cheese (rather than butter) in the middle of my pie crust and treat it just like puff pastry. I went through the rolling and folding process three times.

Final Sheet of Puff Pastry, Ready to Cut

I sliced the sheet of pastry down the center and then cut each half into fingers. I put the fingers on a sheet tray, spritzed them with pan spray, sprinkled on sel gris (French gray sea salt), and put them into a hot oven (425F) for 20 minutes.

Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

In addition to being known for a menu of local cuisine that changed nightly, my restaurant was way in the craft cocktail vanguard. I created all the cocktail recipes, using my chef's palate to ensure that they were refreshing and balanced. One huge customer favorite was a drink that I called Passion for Whiskey, basically a passionfruit whiskey sour. It's a great drink and what we had last night.

1 1/2 ounces bourbon

3/4 ounce St. Germain

3/4 ounce lemon juice

3/4 ounce passionfruit syrup

4 dashes old fashioned bitters

Swirl all ingredients in a shaker full of ice. Strain into a coupe or martini glass. Serve up with a wild cherry for garnish.

Pork Chop with Sweet Potato Hash

I was off early one night in the lead up to Christmas and Ann was home from her parents' house, so I brought home some pork chops and some mâche, a light and slightly nutty salad green. None of us are eating/eating well given the current circumstances with Ann's father, so I am making a conscious effort to at least get us all around the table when I can.

The pork chops I put in a hickory bark syrup brine for about a week before cooking. These I seared in a hot black steel pan and then finished for about five minutes in a 400F oven. A quarter cup of hickory bark (or maple) syrup and a tablespoon of salt to a gallon of water makes a fine brine. Hickory bark syrup is made locally by boiling shagbark hickory bark in water and then adding turbinado sugar which gives it a smoky flavor.

Pork Chop with Sweet Potato Hash and Mâche Salad

I have for years made a sweet potato hash from sweet potatoes, onions, slab bacon, and dried cranberries. Once all is cooked, I deglaze the pan with bourbon to add a woody, caramel note. I spied a sweet potato on the counter and turned it into this hash. Ann wasn't a big fan but I'm not surprised: she's one of those that has an issue with fruit in savory dishes. I find that it a wonderful accompaniment to pork or duck.

Bourbon-Flambéed Sweet Potato, Bacon, and Cranberry Hash

Date Night

This winter has been pretty devastating for restaurant business and as a result, money is super scarce right now so Ann and I haven't really been able to dine out for a while. With the weather turning nice, though, we needed to get out and spend some adult time together and so Monday night, we decided to go get some sushi.

Ann likes a cocktail before dinner, so I decided to surprise her with one of my newest creations called "A Passion for Whiskey" made from Maker's Mark bourbon, St. Germain, passionfruit syrup, lemon juice, and Old Fashioned bitters. This is probably the best cocktail I have ever devised!


Here's to Spring!

The sushi restaurant that we decided to go to is just a few hundred yards from our restaurant, so we parked at the restaurant, where our dishwasher and some of his friends were scrubbing the deck and getting it ready to open for the season. While Ann was chit-chatting with everyone outside, I nipped in and made us cocktails. It was way too nice, the first nice day of spring, to sit inside and after yesterday's snow showers, a glorious, glorious opportunity to take in some warmth outside, so I brought the cocktails outside. All the deck furniture was in the parking lot, so we sat in the parking lot and toasted the season!

Cocktails over, we moved on to Awabi where friend, owner, and sushi chef Marcus Doe made us some of his delights.


Random Rolls Ann Ordered; I'm More of a Nigiri Fan

Neat Little Wasabi Dishes with Chop Stick Rests; Fresh Frozen Wasabi

Whelk and Squid: Best Bites of the Night

Toro Maguro