food: Okinawan sweet potato

cattitude made Okinawan sweet potatoes as part of our dinner tonight. Okinawan sweet potatoes are purple inside, and they stay purple when cooked. So that's an advantage, though it might not be if I was using them in soup.

He bought them on the general theory of "this looks interesting" at Uwajimaya, the big Asian grocery store, yesterday. After a bit of googling around, he decided to roast them: peeled, cut into eighths, tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and cooked them in the oven at 350 (180 C, gas mark 6) for 45 minutes.

They were tasty, but a little mealy, meaning that for roasting I think I prefer our usual orange sweet potatoes/yams*. Next time we'll probably boil and mash them, either with butter and maybe milk (like potatoes), or maybe with coconut milk as some web sources suggested.

* Root vegetable names are a hopeless tangle; go to different islands of the Caribbean and you get the same thing of one root having two or three or more Spanish names, and the same name meaning two or more kinds of roots.

New foods for 2013

Based mostly on looking at posts tagged "2013," the new foods/ingredients I tried last year were: Riga sprats, candied chestnuts, apriums, fresh fava beans, sunflower sprouts, candied lilac petals, and maybe chanterelles.

I'm not sure about counting the chestnuts: this is the first time I'd been given a whole candied chestnut, but shortly before that I had tried and liked Grom's marron glace flavor gelato, which contains actual chestnut pieces.

I am fairly sure I had had chanterelles before, as an ingredient—in some sort of "wild mushroom" sauce at a restaurant—but not by themselves, nor had I cooked them. (I want to do some research into recipes and techniques, ideally before chanterelles are in season again.)

So, the short list would be Riga sprats, apriums, fresh fava beans, sunflower sprouts, and candied lilac petals. The apriums are definitely the star of that list, though the sprats and candied lilac are also quite nice. Sunflower sprouts are just sprouts, okay but unexciting, and my main impression of the fava beans was that they're a lot of work for not much reward.

ETA: I mentioned this to Cattitude after posting. He said the best of the year for him would be the varied salmon species we can get here, notably steelhead.