It’s been a rough week of depriving myself of my favorite food groups: bread and cheez! And it’s only Tuesday. But it’ll all be worth it on Thursday, when I eat my body weight in delicious snacks, side dishes, breads, and desserts.
Tonight I started getting a few things ready for Thanksgiving. Let’s start with sweet potatoes!
These are really easy to make and are high on the butter and delicious factor.
For the uninitiated, there are two ways to do things in life. The hard way or the lazy way. The lazy way of cooking sweet potatoes is to not do anything stupid like peel them. You just throw those babies in a pot, fill with water, and boil the shit out of them.
They’ll get soft and when the skins seem like they are coming off, you put them in a strainer and let them cool. For a really long time. Even if you do this, the ones at the bottom will still be super hot. But those skins will just slide right off when the time comes. No potato peeling blues!
While those babies are cooling, you can make the topping, which includes a favorite ingredient of the dignitaries at Cheezquarters Central, BUTTER! Butter will be a theme over the next several days.
You dump some flour and brown sugar into a bowl with some butter and mash that shit up until it’s nice and crumbly. Then you throw some nuts in your nut chopper, and grind them to within an inch of their lives.
Add the eviscerated nuts to your brown sugar and butter goodness and your topping is set.
Now go have a beer or something, because your potatoes will still be cooling. For a while. This way you won’t care as much when you burn your fingers on your sweet potatoes. Even tho I warned you, you’ll do it anyway. Before you crack a cold one, or after, what do I care, you might want to move the potatoes around in your strainer to let the bottom ones cool off a bit. For the love of all things good and holy, do NOT touch them with your hands. Use some tongs or grabbers of some sort and shuffle those bad boys around.
So now that you’re a beer in and your potatoes are cool enough, just slide the skins off. They should be coming off on their own if you did it right. If not, just peel them a bit and they should come off. Then put them in your bowl (hopefully the bowl of your KitchenAid, because that’s the flagship kitchen tool of the lazy. Well, besides your takeout menu collection.) and add the rest of the ingredients, which are some egg whites, vanilla, sugar, and flour. Now if you’re smart, you just bought your egg whites in a carton, but I forgot to order them (you don’t think I go to the actual grocery store do you? <shudder>), so I had to separate the damn eggs myself. It’s not that hard, so if you are like me and forgot your egg whites, just go ahead and do it the old fashioned way. Viola:
Next, mix those babies up. I used my whisk attachment, but the beater one will work too.
Grease up a casserole dish, and in go the potatoes and then spread the topping on top (duh). I’l be cooking these on Thursday, so they’ll just chill with their friends in the fridge until then.
I’m too lazy to copy the recipe to this blog post, but if you want it, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it.
On the docket tomorrow is bread, pie, and pumpkin cheezcake!
Oh, and since all this good food ain’t free, this workout is also on the docket for tomorrow. Wish me luck.