Southern Pie-in-the-Sky

By Pat Stinson
Sun contributor
Just arrived — our last, weekly CSA (community-supported agriculture) bag of fresh booty from Black Star Farms. It’s a monster, too. Hefty packages in past weeks have revealed a Christmas-like surprise beneath the eggs, parsley, chives, lettuce, spinach, corn, carrots and tomatoes. Sometimes, a portion of a giant watermelon, a whole cantaloupe or a sweet honeydew melon would wait at the bottom. Other times, when the harvest was light or the bug infestation too severe, (members of a CSA are asked to share the “risk” of acts of nature, as well as the rewards), a bottle of fine BSF wine or a huge hunk of Leelanau Raclette Cheese would be the buried treasure.
Not this week.
The heftiest part of fall’s last harvest is the most puzzling to prepare: sweet potatoes. Unlike the giant bags of tomatoes, onions and cucumbers that my better half learned to can this summer, Dixieland’s favorite root vegetable doesn’t seem a likely candidate for the pantry.

It’s shameful, but it doesn’t help that one-half of the household heritage hails from Walnut Ridge, Ark. Great-grandmother Myrtle, “Mama Myrt,” served a side of mashed sweet potatoes with her famed chicken and dumplings for servicemen and townsfolk who frequented her boarding house during World War II. Her daughter, Marie, “Gramma Ree,” moved to Keego Harbor, Mich., after the war and preferred to make raisin pie. Her daughter, Betty Sue, only learned to make sweet potato pie after working in the Cass Corridor of Detroit, shortly before her retirement. Her youngest daughter never liked the candied sweet potatoes served at Thanksgiving and Christmas and shunned the spud for years.
No, the apples falling from our southern family tree were more like World Series pitches.
The question of what to do with these hypoallergenic “apples of the earth” remains a mystery. We refuse to add sugar; the spuds are already sweet, thank you. A quick search of my neighbor’s “upnorthfoodies.com” website led to a cookbook with recipes for stealth cooking with vegetables … and an idea for sweet potato French toast that calls for all of a third of a cup. Not too helpful.
Allergy Cook Margaret Crook has taught us how to bake sweet potato pudding for breakfast, steam sweet potatoes with apples on pork for dinner, and fry sweet potato slices as snacks. Ms. Chard, an Upper Peninsula gardener, delighted us with her recipe for sweet potato casserole in the cookbook, “Hollyhocks & Radishes.” But, really, how many sweet potatoes can two people eat?
If an edible solution for our five orphaned pounds isn’t found soon, a sweet potato homebrew is likely to appear in the cellar next March.
Spuds, anyone?