I came very late to the sweet potato.  Here was Thanksgiving, the greatest tribute to the varieties of savory taste, and right in the center of it, foul tradition had inserted a sickly sweet bright-orange casserole, sometimes implausibly studded with marshmallows, of all things.  What was to like?  But I have an adult palate now, accustomed to the superficially disgusting constituents of grown up connoisseurship: coffee, beer, wine, yogurt…sweet potatoes.

My first and only memorable experience with sweet potato fries was at Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia (sadly shuttered, for the moment, I believe).  They were thin, crisp, liberally sprinkled with Old Bay and delicious.  Unfortunately, I’ve never found their equal elsewhere.  Most subsequent attempts I’ve sampled have been limp and mushy, with none of the snap I like in a french fry.

With my relocation to a much smaller kitchen in NYC, space is at a premium, but through some combination of nostalgia and luck, an ‘heirloom’ deep fryer made the cut, so I thought I’d give my own sweet potato fries a try:

Some notes:

1. Moisture is the biggest enemy of sweet potato fries.  I cut these into a fairly small julienne and lightly salted them, leaving them on paper towels to weep some of their liquid for an hour or two.

2. Everything I’ve read says you really have to fry twice to get a crisp product.  The first time should be about 325 and the second at 375.  I fried these a little too hot both times.  You should let them dry and cool between fryings.

3. Leave the skin on.

4. Though Ortlieb’s fries were heavily seasoned, I loved these with just a light salt.

Video action:

The song is Ludwig by Sax Kari & The Codes, found at the Internet Archive and used in accord with the Creative Commons License: Attribution.

I used my Philadelphia Collard Greens and a heapin’ helpin’ of bacon for these savory scones.  I judge them a success, though I don’t think I could reconstruct the recipe exactly, and it involved a great deal of finger-in-the-wind on-the-fly estimates, if I may mix those metaphors.  As almost always, the Joy of Cooking is a good place to start.

Video proof that you can bake and talk on the phone at the same time.  ”Oh really? Awesome!”

The beats are by Aeon, about whom you can read and hear more at Aggregate Dope.

It’s probably not worth speculating on why exactly collard greens are not widely eaten outside of the American south. Growing up in the southwest and migrating to the northeast and then to Philadelphia, I hadn’t eaten them until well into my twenties. But as vegetables go, they’re almost perfect. They taste great cooked in a little bacon grease, accompanied by onions, garlic, tomatoes, or almost anything you want to add to them. I recently tried a variation on the technique described in the video below that was totally vegetarian, substituting butter for bacon grease. The nutritional benefits are stunning, bacon fat notwithstanding:

Collard leaves are rich in calcium (226 mg per cup, cooked), vitamins B1, B2, B9, and C (which may be leached by cooking, however), as well as beta-carotene (pro-vitamin A). Each 100 g of leaves provides 46 calories (190 kilojoules) of food energy and contains 4 g of protein, 0.5 grams of fat, 7 g of carbohydrates.

Widely considered to be healthful foods, they are high in vitamin C and soluble fiber and contain multiple nutrients with potent anti-cancer properties: diindolylmethane, sulforaphane and selenium.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have recently discovered that 3,3′-Diindolylmethane in Brassica vegetables such as collard greens is a potent modulator of the innate immune response system with potent anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-cancer activity.

Another remarkable thing about them, unlike many other greens, is that they can be frozen almost indefinitely before being reheated. And don’t even get me–or that nut Zell Miller–started on the virtues of potlikker. (Hell, it rates its own blog). Anyway, here’s how I make my Philadelphia Collard Greens: