sweet potatoes

A pile of sweet potatoes is roasted. How many? I have no idea. That would depend on how many people you expect to feed.  I was not expecting to feed anybody besides myself.  I planned on a lot of holdover sweet potatoes for one person. As it happened, I was called out of my slumming with some degree of insistence and so my planned surplus turned out to be for many partiers. I imagined it would run out and that was fine with me. Even with that, it then resulted in a lot left over because there was so much other food at the party and nobody actually pigged out on my sweet potatoes. And ah pity da foo who ignored them completely because they have no idea what they missed, and there is nothing I can do about that even if I wanted to. 

The potatoes are easier to peel when they are roasted. Roasting concentrates flavor. Their starch begins to convert to sugar. The liquid that exudes onto the roasting pan burns to a kind of charred cotton candy. It is a strange alchemy happening and there is no comparing to boiling them. Just roast them and you will see. 

Make a sauce. Let's just pretend here and imagine making too much sauce. 

*  half a stick of butter

*  three cups real orange juice. Not fake-o orange juice.

*  one cup orange juice in a jar shaken with 2 level teaspoons corn starch for thickener. Added while whisking, but not all at once. Let it cook awhile to see its effect. Add the rest if necessary. If it becomes too thick, then dilute with more orange juice. 

*  a few tablespoons of brown sugar. Taste to judge for yourself how sweet you want your sauce to be

*  grated fresh ginger, a few teaspoons. 

*  1/4 teaspoon salt

* add fresh pineapple, NOT CANNED, no tins of pineapple allowed! That stuff is gross. Compare them side by side one day and see for yourself. You will never buy tinned pineapple again. This was fresh and then frozen because one whole pineapple was too much for the thing I was doing at the time. While I had the freezer opened I noticed mango frozen similarly so these sweet potatoes almost had mango with them instead of pineapple. The chief difference is acid. So these sweet potatoes have two types of acid, orange and pineapple. Mangoes would have been fine, but the result would have been less acid although with slightly more citric coming through. It was a style choice. Either one would have been fine. 

*  Cinnamon and *  nutmeg in very moderate amounts.  *  Clove in even more  conservative amount. Hints of these three things. I did not want to affect the color too much, and I did not want it to taste too much like a pie filling. 

These are the extras ↓ included for flavor profile and texture extension and for interest. I had a whole shelf devoted to things like this I could chose from. It would be nearly impossible to go wrong.