Dear Laura
“TOO late!” she cried. So now Mike’s kind aunt – no, don’t use other epithets – has given you a basket of sweet potatoes to go with the spinach. She wasn’t to know that you hate them almost as much as each other and it’s too late to tell her now. Anyway, you say the spinach was bearable and that is a lot harder to disguise than sweet potatoes.
Those croquettes that you tucked into, until you found out what they were, were not difficult to make. Peel, boil and mash your sweet potatoes. Put in some salt and pepper, but don’t add milk and butter. You need to keep them as dry as possible so that the egg will stick them together.
Beat an egg and mix in as much of it as you need to make the sweet potato into a manageable consistency. Shape into patties, roll in breadcrumbs and fry in a little oil. For extra disguise, you can add a teaspoon or two of instant stuffing mix to the breadcrumbs. The sage and onion version is particularly tasty with chicken.
Another suggestion would be to parboil them and roast them under the Sunday joint. This works very well with lamb. Another root that does very well this way is parsnip.
My last experiment with an unfamiliar vegetable was not very successful. The strange objects – which seem not to have an English name – appeared to have been knitted out of thatching string. Once the skin was removed, they looked a bit like turnips and, as they steamed, they changed colour. By the time they were done, they were blue! I just couldn’t bring myself to eat them.
Mind you, I had taken the advice of the shop assistant as to how to cook them. Maybe the customer who suggested I should chuck them in a curry had a better idea – They’d have looked more appetising if they were curry-coloured.
