Sweet Potatoes and Salad

Right now I'm in a sort of sweet potato, yam planting frenzy. Maybe frenzy is too frenzied a word though. And we do need to harvest what we've got, from two varieties of sweet potatoes, before the pigs get in and eat them first. It was only recently I even heard of ube yams.  Oh joy, they had some plants for sale at our natural foods store! That wild and crazy purple one they use in the Philippines for desserts, and it has now been planted.  The infamous Ghana yam plantings are doing very well.  And, BTW, the lovely fish bowl is by a local artist, Esther Szegedy.

All this to say I made a super duper sweet potato salad, which actually started with the Milk Street Vegetables cookbook by Christopher Kimball, and his Japanese-Style Glazed Sweet Potatoes with Sesame - totally fabulous itself, but with a few leftovers.  We do have lots of those purple sweet potatoes (not ube yams) going at the moment.  So I just subbed them in for the Japanese ones.  Of course, now we must try the golden Japanese variety.  Can't believe we haven't yet. And if good, plant them too! Why not?  In a big recession, we will definitely be getting our carbs.

More on Milk Street Vegetables: This is the second time I've borrowed it from the library and there are still so many things I want to try, sooooo looking on that as a sign, will have to make another cookbook purchase.  OMG!  I SAID I WOULDN'T!  And, just so you know, it's not totally vegetarian.  I did notice some shrimps in there.

Then serendipitously, the supermarket flyer came, which it does on a semi-monthly basis, often with really good recipes. This time with a cover that jumped out at me. Does that salad look good, or what?  Bring on the leftovers!  The only changes made were to substitute our Pacific spinach for the soft-leaf lettuce, and to use culantro instead of the cilantro.  Culantro is a perennial, tropical version.  We both loved this hearty, vibrant and tasty salad.

To be shared with Weekend Cooking, hosted by the wonderful, Intrepid Baker, Marge, and also with Heather of Foodies Read Challenge fame.