Pie for Supper!

by Audrey

Here is a follow-up on the sweet potato essay - my favorite sweet potato recipe. I prefer dishes that solidly sweet or savory, and this is a lovely savory pie that makes a great main dish. Serve with a salad (I love the bright colors of the orange pie next to a salad with arugula and roasted beets), and some bread. We had a dinner guest who allegedly disliked sweet potatoes, but had seconds of this pie!

SAVORY SWEET POTATO PIE

2 cups mashed sweet potatoes

1 cup plain yogurt

2 eggs

1/2 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup minced onion

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon fresh sage leaves, plus 5-6 pretty sage leaves

1 teaspoon salt

a few grinds of black pepper

1 9" pie crust (I like to add some finely chopped pecans to the pie crust)

Preheat the oven to 375 F.
Peel and chop the sweet potatoes, and steam until tender.
Meanwhile, saute the onion in the butter until translucent, then add the garlic and saute for a couple more minutes.
Puree the sweet potatoes (a food processor or blender works well) and make sure you have 2 cups
Add the yogurt, eggs, onion/garlic, salt, pepper and sage. Puree until smooth.
Pour the sweet potato mixture into the pie crust. Decorate the top with the reserved sage leaves.
Bake for 40-50 minutes.

Sweetness

by Farmwife Audrey

Sweet potatoes are possibly my favorite vegetable. They even have a delicious-sounding Latin name: Ipomoea batatas. Its cousins include the showy, and prolific, morning glory. Though a tropical plant from the Americas, sweet potatoes can be grown in chilly New England, and brighten our tables at Thanksgiving and well into the winter.

Ian reporting on the harvest on his tater-phone.

We’ve grown sweet potatoes at Simple Gifts Farm for years, and love to see their beautiful vines sprawling across the field, to harvest them just after the first frost, and to share their carotenous bounty with you.  This year (with a bit of help from a weeding fairy), we grew a nice crop, pulling out about 2 tons from 1/3 of an acre.

However, they do have some fussy post-harvest requirements. Immediately after harvest, sweet potatoes must be cured at high temperature (80^oF) and humidity, conditions that are not typical of October in Massachusetts. Thereafter, the tubers need to be stored at cool room temperature (55-60oF), which is much warmer than the mid-30s that most root crops enjoy.

In past years, we’ve somewhat fudged this part, curing them in the greenhouse. In many autumns, this works reasonably well, with toasty daytime temperatures and moderate nights. After curing, we have stacked crates and crates in our home basement, which is conveniently at just the right storage temperature during the winter. Not so conveniently, our basement (which is also where we send cabin-fevered children and do the laundry), gets pretty dirty, especially when the crew comes through the window to fetch a crate or two for the winter share.

Last year, however, our luck with the greenhouse-loosy-goosy-curing ran out. As house-boss, I was traumatized. I don’t really like to think about it. I didn’t want to write about it, but Jeremy thought it was a good example of how we learn and improve things each year. After last year’s late first frost, it became dismally cold. After ‘curing’ the sweet potatoes in the not-hot greenhouse, the crates stacked in our lovely basement grew horrible white mold all over them. You see, curing literally means that the heat and humidity cure the inevitable nicks and bruises that sweet potatoes acquire when harvested and disconnected from their vines. A cork layer develops, and suberin is deposited (this is for the plant nerds – suberin is a waxy material produced by the tuber’s outer root cells).  The cork layer and suberin act as a barrier to decay-causing microorganisms and to excessive moisture loss during storage. Curing also jump-starts the process of converting starch to sugar, which makes sweet potatoes sweet.

We lost most of the crop last year. Something had to change.

Jeremy, circa 1998, on a farm-built rocket ship.

This year, we have the U-Haul. Jeremy got it for cheap from a guy just over the border in Vermont, who had super-insulated it as a retrofitted walk-in cooler for his yogurt delivery business. The first time we tried, a small space heater got the inside up to 120^oF. Talk about Yankee ingenuity. It is a really ugly truck, but it is awesome.  Jeremy got a $35 thermostat for the space heater, and now can keep the U-Haul a cozy, even 80^oF.  So, we’ll cure the sweet potatoes for a week or so, then turn down the thermostat to 55^oF, where they can happily hang out with the winter squash until we all eat them.  I swear, farmers SHOULD build rockets.

First Frost: A Photo Essay

We rise to greet the first frosty sunrise at Simple Gifts Farm with a bittersweet mix of relief, sadness, and the type of exhaustion you feel after climbing a beautiful and steep mountain. 

We, and the farm, have landed in autumn. Frost is the kiss of death for tender crops like eggplant, but a sweet kiss for hardy crops like the Brussels sprouts and kale.

We were out yesterday evening, double-checking that all our hoophouses were tucked down, protecting our autumn crops. We'll be out this week, harvesting the sweet potatoes.

The clover and rye are unperturbed by this frost, and will continue be a living blanket of green on our resting fields.