Week 43 - Candied

One of the difficulties with being up to date on the 52 week challenge (since I meal plan the week or weekend before) is that I don't have the luxury of being able to see how other people handled the challenge or the suggestions they put up in the weekly introduction thread. Even if I already have some ideas for a challenge, seeing those can be helpful for refining my choices or clarifying the theme. Usually not a big deal since the themes are often pretty self-explanatory, but I was apparently not spot on with the theme for week 43 - candied.

When I hear candied, what I think about immediately is candied yams. I don't even particularly love them since I find them very sweet, but I knew I wanted to try making them for the challenge. When the introductory thread got posted that Monday, they had changed the name of the theme there from candied to candying, which has an entirely different meaning. They even posted that candying was the "process of coating food in sugar or syrup" and cooking until there was a "hard, sugary shell around the outside." It seemed like most people knew that was what was meant by candied with their candied bacon or candied ginger or candied fruit. Not me. I wasn't going to get a hard, sugary shell around these yams, but it counts for me because I already had my plan, it really did fit the theme before the explanation went up, and I'm not even officially participating anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

I loosely followed this recipe from Simply Recipes for candied yams. To make the dish, I used:

- 2 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped ($2.06)

- salt ($0.03)

- 2 cups orange juice ($0.75)

- 3/4 cup brown sugar ($0.50)

- 1 tsp ground ginger ($0.05)

- 1 tsp ground cinnamon ($0.05)

- 2 tbsp butter ($0.50)

The total for the yams was a little under $4, which isn't too bad, but that was only one component of our meal (more on that later).

This is a pretty easy recipe. You bring a pot of water to a boil, add the sweet potatoes, and then cook them until they're "no longer crunchy." I think I let them go a little too long so they were really soft, but that was okay with me. When they're about to be done, start the sauce - the juice, brown sugar, ginger, cinnamon, and butter - and bring it to a boil, then add the sweet potatoes.

Once all the sweet potatoes are coated in the sauce, you put the heat on high and let it boil until it has reduced down and has the consistency of syrup. It looked like this for a long time and I was starting to think I would have another recipe execution failure on my hands, but then I let it go for a bit without checking on it, gave it a look, and it was perfectly reduced.

If I was going to make candied yams, then we were going to have a mini Thanksgiving dinner, an idea I loved since I love Thanksgiving dinner. A made his green bean casserole and I heated up some of the new Trader Joe's turkey sausage (more on that here), and together with our candied yams, we had a pretty colorful Thanksgiving plate. (My favorite part of Thanksgiving - stuffing - isn't here, but we already had more than enough food for the night.) It wasn't a cheap dinner, coming in around $17.45 total ($3.94 for the yams, $4.99 for the turkey, and $8.52 for the green bean casserole), but it was tasty. (Technically it was a little less since there was some green bean casserole left over for lunch the next day, but that calculation is too hard to figure out precisely.)

The yams were good, but very, very sweet. There was a nice burst of citrus flavor throughout because of all the orange juice, but the predominant flavor was definitely sweet. Although this was good, and we did enjoy it, I think I'm more inclined to take sweet potatoes and roast them in the oven with some savory spices because I prefer savory. But if making a sweet preparation for yams or sweet potatoes, I definitely think this is a good recipe.