I mentioned we ate a LOT of sweet potatoes in the fall and I thought I would share some of the recipes we discovered to use them up. Our absolute favorite was sweet potato fries, my kids still love them, even after eating so many.
The hardest part for me was figuring out the best way to cut them, it is a tedious chore to make a big pile for your hungry family with just a knife--doable, but better for a smaller scale side dish than trying to push other more expensive ingredients off your plate.
I started off trying to cut them with a Mandolin slicer--epic fail. I gave it a herculean effort but I just didn't have the muscles to push them through hard enough. My first three potatoes turned out the best and after that my muscles turned to jelly. And I'm not exactly a wimp--not a weight lifter, but I'll take on any other Mom in my play group in a round of arm wrestling :)
Next I tried a commercial french fry cutter. Surprisingly this wasn't much easier, although far more of the potato turned into fry (with the mandolin I was left with a lot of chunks that were too small to try without losing a finger).
So off to Google I went, surely SOMEONE must have figured out how to make the perfect sweet potato fries at home! Not that I could find--lots of how to bake them, how to season them, almost nil on how to cut them. I did see one obscure reference to prebaking them on a message board but with no additional details given as to temperature or time so I set up the Test Kitchen. My regular baked sweet potato recipe calls for baking them at 400 for 40-50 minutes. So I prebaked my first batch at 400 for 15 minutes. These cut like butter--but also made a nice bowl of baby food in the process with all the mushy bits on the edges. Next I tried 400 for 10 minutes and 350 for 10 minutes. 350 for 10 minutes was a winner for me--it still required a bit of muscles to push them through the cutter but without even a tiny bit of mushing--all of the sweet potato turned into gorgeous restaurant-esque fries. Success! (and if you have a friend over to help you lean on the handle you won't even break a sweat, this is a great buddy cooking project)
No french fry cutter? They cost about $40 at your local restaurant supply store--not super expensive, but an extra piece of kitchen equipment to store. Don't bother with the flimsy metal one at the local kitchen supply outlet, it won't give you the results you want, my Mom had one growing up and it struggled to cut regular potatoes, let alone a denser/harder sweet potato. Part two of this post will address cutting them in a cuisinart (I have their thickest slicing blade on the way to try out, it's only $20, far smaller to store, a super versatile). I also plan to test out another reference I came across to putting them in the dehydrator for a short time after cutting/before baking. They said this would make for crispier sweet potato fries by removing some of the moisture prior to baking. Sounds logical so I'll test that out as well. I just recently purchased 2 bushels of sweet potatoes fresh from the field of a local farmer for 50 cents a pound so I have plenty of potatoes to experiment with :) I'm also going to look into some other dehydrator/sweet potato combos--I remember my Mom making Pumpkin Apple fruit leather as a kid and I'd like to try something similar with sweet potato puree.
For today, the take away is **PREBAKE SWEET POTATOES @350 FOR 10 MINUTES BEFORE SLICING INTO FRIES**
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Place Holder for Recipes that I've been meaning to share
Stay tuned for some really tasty cheap recipes I have found over the past few months, I've got some winners you'll want to add to your frugal repertoire!
Success or Failure?
Wow, lets just say I'm not cut out to be a blogger! lol I gave it a real good shot for all of two weeks and just couldn't afford the minimal time commitment it required. I so enjoy reading others blogs and I will never know how you do it. I can compose eloquent blog posts in my head while I'm washing dishes in the morning but by the time the kids are tucked in and I have a moment of quiet every coherent thought has long since fled. :) So this will be my summary post on the Ketchup Soup experiment. I will still occasionally post something here if I come across an amazingly cheap recipe or something uber frugal worth sharing, I have a couple recipes that I really wanted to share that haven't made it up, but for now here's the results of the $60/month spending:
September--We came in pretty close to the $60 amount, I was sure we'd do better the following month. Gave up our Costco membership in anticipation of spending very little on groceries for the next six months. In hindsight, this was a really smart move--from now on we will have a year of membership and then let it lapse for as long as possible before renewing. My mother in law just gave us a gift membership for my birthday and I am surprised at some of the bulk things we are just now using up, even with the challenge.
October--Spent the entire $60 on perishables (milk, eggs, veggies, bread), and rather quickly. Realized that even with a huge pantry reserve I would be hard pressed to buy healthy food for my family on $60 a month. Sure, I could feed them Ramen until they puke but no ones health or well being shall be compromised for the sake of this experiment! Cleaned up a LOT of food in the freezer, veggies, fruit, meat, first time in months you could open the freezer without something falling out and crushing your toes. Finding the weekly meal plan rotation to be very helpful, getting *into* a 'rut' is actually helping me be more creative by focusing my thoughts on variety within the sub-category (spaghetti last week/shells this week, stir-fry rice last week/casserole rice this week etc.)
November--Did surprisingly better this month, starting to really get creative in the pantry. Pumpkin brownies anyone? Yes they are tasty, and healthy! Well, you know, sorta healthy in a chocolatey kind of way ;) Hardest part of this challenge has been not spending money on chocolate. Not that I'm a total chocoholic, but when I crave it I really really crave it and there is nary a crumb to be had. (Yes, I already gobbled the Halloween chocolate, the kids know the chocolate is for mama!) Eating a LOT of eggs. Aldis has them for 49 cents a dozen, limit four. We are averaging two dozen a week. The kids are eating hard boiled eggs for lunch (made with Bento egg molds, Google them, SUPER cute!), my husband is taking egg salad sandwiches to work, I am eating egg white 'omelets' with leftover veggies, garden broccoli or salsa. And we still have one of our standby egg recipes every Wednesday (Egg Puff, Eggs ala Goldenrod, or Fried Egg Sandwhiches).
The garden...well, it tried valiantly but I believe our timing was a little off when it came to planting. The broccoli excelled and was thoroughly enjoyed, everything else put forth effort but yielded very little. No cucumbers, no peppers, no beans, no snow peas, THREE cherry tomatoes, a couple handfuls of baby zucchinis. (Looking forward to trying again this month, soon as the snow melts!)
December--In which we eat a LOT of sweet potatoes. At 25 cents a pound the week of Thanksgiving, we bought a three months supply. I plan to sell some of the kids outgrown things sometime before next sweet potato season so I can buy one of those restaurant style french fry cutters. My kids like my baked sweet potato fries, and I would make them far more often if they took seconds to prep instead of a half hour of chopping. (It will take until then before I'm ready to look at another sweet potato though.) Still over on our spending, but very consciously over, for things like veggies and bread, no junk food spending. It has been eye opening to question every purchase, especially as the dollars in the envelope dwindle each month. Do we really need cereal? We still have oatmeal. Can we buy another bag of flour instead of another loaf of bread?
January/February--Unexpected visit from the inlaws necessitated a mattress purchase so we pooled January and February's cash and used it to buy a mattress. (We needed to buy one for our daughter in the next year or so anyhow so we decided not to go the airbed route and rather put that money towards a real mattress) So the experiment ended two months early. It hurt to quit but I didn't want to let my pride stand in the way of common sense...and my family was ready for Oreos again :)
And that is that--technically, the experiment was a failure, I was unable to live within a $60 a month budget. But I learned a lot and we saved a lot (debt free Christmas, paid down debt) and I lost a lot--10 pounds! So I'm chalking it up as a success! :)
September--We came in pretty close to the $60 amount, I was sure we'd do better the following month. Gave up our Costco membership in anticipation of spending very little on groceries for the next six months. In hindsight, this was a really smart move--from now on we will have a year of membership and then let it lapse for as long as possible before renewing. My mother in law just gave us a gift membership for my birthday and I am surprised at some of the bulk things we are just now using up, even with the challenge.
October--Spent the entire $60 on perishables (milk, eggs, veggies, bread), and rather quickly. Realized that even with a huge pantry reserve I would be hard pressed to buy healthy food for my family on $60 a month. Sure, I could feed them Ramen until they puke but no ones health or well being shall be compromised for the sake of this experiment! Cleaned up a LOT of food in the freezer, veggies, fruit, meat, first time in months you could open the freezer without something falling out and crushing your toes. Finding the weekly meal plan rotation to be very helpful, getting *into* a 'rut' is actually helping me be more creative by focusing my thoughts on variety within the sub-category (spaghetti last week/shells this week, stir-fry rice last week/casserole rice this week etc.)
November--Did surprisingly better this month, starting to really get creative in the pantry. Pumpkin brownies anyone? Yes they are tasty, and healthy! Well, you know, sorta healthy in a chocolatey kind of way ;) Hardest part of this challenge has been not spending money on chocolate. Not that I'm a total chocoholic, but when I crave it I really really crave it and there is nary a crumb to be had. (Yes, I already gobbled the Halloween chocolate, the kids know the chocolate is for mama!) Eating a LOT of eggs. Aldis has them for 49 cents a dozen, limit four. We are averaging two dozen a week. The kids are eating hard boiled eggs for lunch (made with Bento egg molds, Google them, SUPER cute!), my husband is taking egg salad sandwiches to work, I am eating egg white 'omelets' with leftover veggies, garden broccoli or salsa. And we still have one of our standby egg recipes every Wednesday (Egg Puff, Eggs ala Goldenrod, or Fried Egg Sandwhiches).
The garden...well, it tried valiantly but I believe our timing was a little off when it came to planting. The broccoli excelled and was thoroughly enjoyed, everything else put forth effort but yielded very little. No cucumbers, no peppers, no beans, no snow peas, THREE cherry tomatoes, a couple handfuls of baby zucchinis. (Looking forward to trying again this month, soon as the snow melts!)
December--In which we eat a LOT of sweet potatoes. At 25 cents a pound the week of Thanksgiving, we bought a three months supply. I plan to sell some of the kids outgrown things sometime before next sweet potato season so I can buy one of those restaurant style french fry cutters. My kids like my baked sweet potato fries, and I would make them far more often if they took seconds to prep instead of a half hour of chopping. (It will take until then before I'm ready to look at another sweet potato though.) Still over on our spending, but very consciously over, for things like veggies and bread, no junk food spending. It has been eye opening to question every purchase, especially as the dollars in the envelope dwindle each month. Do we really need cereal? We still have oatmeal. Can we buy another bag of flour instead of another loaf of bread?
January/February--Unexpected visit from the inlaws necessitated a mattress purchase so we pooled January and February's cash and used it to buy a mattress. (We needed to buy one for our daughter in the next year or so anyhow so we decided not to go the airbed route and rather put that money towards a real mattress) So the experiment ended two months early. It hurt to quit but I didn't want to let my pride stand in the way of common sense...and my family was ready for Oreos again :)
And that is that--technically, the experiment was a failure, I was unable to live within a $60 a month budget. But I learned a lot and we saved a lot (debt free Christmas, paid down debt) and I lost a lot--10 pounds! So I'm chalking it up as a success! :)
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