Sweet Potatoes ala Davidson sort of (less than a dollar, a little more than half an hour)

Danielle Davidson was one of the finest students I've ever had the privilege to teach.

No, she's not dead. She just graduated and got a job. What were you thinking?

Anyway, she wrote me a while ago with a recipe, which like a terrible self-replicating virus (not the kind I was envisioning, but oh well), I read, punctured the membrane of, wrote my genetic code into, and began merrily to change. I'm sorry, Danielle. Never trust me to pass on anything directly. I just can't. It's not in my nature.

Now, when I think of Gone with the Wind (1939), I tend to remember a couple of key scenes. The dead and dying at the station. The red dressing gown. But mostly: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" [Music rises.] I tend, however, to forget that the food she's found is radishes. RADISHES.

Not what in my mind even starving people relish. Radishes. So when I remember the scene, I unconsciously replace the radishes with a better tasting, creamy delish food, a yummy, non-radishy substance.

Sweet potatoes. Ummmm.

I don't remember sweet potatoes much in my childhood; in fact, though I knew what they were, mostly I remember the baked variety that my ex-mother-in-law took to my husband's grandmother in the nursing home/hospital: a single, caramelized baked potato, cold and in its skin. A kind of gift.

So for me, sweet potatoes are a newish thing. I originally treated them like white potatoes: mashed, butter and salt, etc. They were okay like this, nothing special. Then I tried treating them like squash, baked, butter and cinnamon. They were like dessert like this: very sweet.

This was not satisfying. Then I started making fudge, not with sweet potatoes, but with chocolate of course: to which I started adding chili powder. Then I got Danielle's recipe. Then I started thinking.

And THEN I bought this crazy stuff: chipotle powder (Jesus God, its own website!). Dekalb Farmer's Market is a wonder, the tenth or whatever wonder of the world. Who knew you could powder chipotles?

So: this is the simplification and perversion of Danielle's sweet potatoes.

You need about two pounds of sweet potatoes, salt, oil, chipotle powder. And an oven. That's it.

Preheat oven to 350.

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes into about 1 1/2" pieces.

Lightly oil a heavy, oven-proof dish.

Dump in the diced sweet potatoes and stir to coat them with the oil.

Sprinkle with about a tsp of salt.

Then, depending on how spicy you like things, sprinkle a pinch (not very spicy) or two (spicy) or three (you better have some milk [for Lucy] near) over the sweet potato.

Bake until they're soft, about half an hour.

Stir them half way through to distribute the spices.

Eat. It's yummy stuff. And good for you!

There you go.

Easy Mac (less than $2; about 15 minutes)

Seriously. Does anyone know what that orange powder is that comes in a box of mac and cheese you buy when you need comfort food?

Specifically, where the hell does the orange come from? It's neon, it's weird, it probably sneaks around in your cupboard at night, inviting the marshmallow cream to help out in its seduction of the brownie mix. It probably has one of those round, rotating beds. It probably listens to Al Green and wears necklaces with Italian horns on them. Honestly, it probably needs a good two weeks of penicillin. I mean, who knows what it's bringing to the table? Could be anyone. Could be anything.

I like orange. I wear a lot of orange. This orange just frightens the bejesus out of me.

Hence: easy mac, homemade. It's white. And, aside from what might be hiding in the white (by which I mean in the parm, the milk, the canola, or the pasta), you know what you're eating.

I guess ideally you'd make your own parm from the milk you got from your own cow/sheep; your own oil from your own canolas (canolis? Does anyone know what a canola is? [okay, CANada + Oil + a? Really?]); and make your own pasta from wheat grown on your own property, from dirt you made -- and from eggs you harvested from your own chickens whom you feed with your own scratch -- and from whatever else you might decide you can gather from around you, unpolluted by the touch of other people's diabolical plans to poison you with neon-orange additives.

But let's say that for the time being, we're just going to move one step closer to controlling ingredients. And that this is, in fact, as easy or easier that that box mac you ingest, or give your kids to ingest, on any given day.

Here's what you'll want. This will feed at least four people as a meal.

Large sauce pot

pound of pasta, any shape. Flat pasta cooks faster than pasta that's bunchy. The fastest is angel hair. The slowest I've found is gemelli.

some parmesan, any sort -- even (and here's how you can tell this is not a gourmet recipe) the stuff in a shake jar.

A little milk.

a little oil.

That's it.

Okay, boil the pasta until it's the tenderness you like it. My Nana complains that Americans eat their pasta raw (which is her word for al dente); I say, if you want to chew, undercook. If you want to gum and slide for your mastication, have at it.

If you've never boiled pasta before, the rule is a LOT of water. Pasta needs to swim, so cover it and then some. Boil the water, add the pasta. Keep it boiling until it's done.

Drain the pasta and shake it to clear all the water. Return it to the warm pot. Drizzle on some oil, maybe a TBSP. Splash in some milk, less than a 1/4 cup. If you want some herbs, try a little oregano. Also, you can weaponize with jalapeno paste; just stir it in at this point.

Keep the pot, and the pasta, warm if you need to on a VERY LOW heat. Mix so all the pasta's coated. Put some parm on it, maybe a 1/4 cup max. Stir once or twice, very lightly.

Do this again and again until when you stir, you don't see milk puddling in the bottom of the pan.

Parm is funny and can clump, so you don't want to over-stir. If it clumps, peel that part off the spoon, eat it, and keep going. Add a little more milk if you think the pasta's not coated to your liking.

The finest meal-variation of this is to add peas to the boiling water. Pasta Parm Peas is what I used to call it. You can also add shrimp or chicken. If you do, you get to name it.

There you go.

Because You Can Never Get Enough Squash in Your Dessert (maybe $10 for a whole pan; about 40 minutes)

These are pumpkin-based dessert objects that I could sit and eat forever, except that if I did I would also feel shame forever, have to go to my first confession (this is a story [not by Frank O'Connor] for another time), and spend too much time atoning.

That Catholic thing never leaves you. The Jesuits were right. I haven't been to mass since the last Catholic dead person forced me there, but I still get the guilties, just like the good nuns told me I would. Or Jiminy Cricket. Sometimes I get the two confused.

On the other hand, being a mother the BVM would likely appreciate that I am eating my vegetables and fruit, even if they do come looking like something intensely bad for you.

What I have for you today, the day before I have to step back into the classroom and try to justify what I love best (writing, reading, and not stock-reports), is Pumpkin Treats. They're very modified versions of BH&G's Pumpkin Bars, over which the BVM would weep if she could read English, given the sugar and oil and such.

[Hey, when you get bodily taken up to heaven, do you think you get to learn everything? Like, say, reading -- since I'm betting good money (drachmas? talents? shekls?) that the wife of a carpenter in Nazareth during Roman times was illiterate. Or, say, what the hell a pumpkin is, since I don't know if they grew ditto. Or, say, how come the word pumpkin, a nice enough word, gets all cutesified by people in the throes of sentimentalism over children, wives, dogs, what have you.]

What you need:

lasagna pan or large lasagna-pan type baking dish, lightly greased (I use spray-grease)

2 c flour

1/4 c sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cloves (ground)

4 eggs, beaten

1 can pumpkin (15 oz)

1/8 c oil

1 cup applesauce, preferably home-made. This way you get chunks and not much sugar.

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (on the list, everything through cloves). In a separate bowl, combine the wet stuff. Pour wet stuff into the dry stuff, and mix thoroughly, then pour into greased lasagna pan. Smooth out lightly with a spatula.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool and cut into squares. Try not to eat six at a time. I bet you can't.

The original recipe calls for frosting these with cream cheese icing. Gilding the lily, I say, but if you want to, gild away.

There you go.

Locked and Loaded, Sir, Yes, Sir (less than a dollar, 1 minute or less)

[No, you've come to the right blog: I changed the colors because, much as I loved the way the black looked with the pictures, the letters swam and danced and I was getting a headache trying to read the thing. Let me know if this works better for you, or if you really want to be back in black again. I'll listen, my disciples. My precious.]

Okay, today: weapons. Specifically, habaneros, jalapenos, hot peppers and that voodoo they do so well.

I issue a warning here. Working with hot peppers means washing your hands A LOT, with soap and hot water, before you touch your eyes or any other mucusoid or otherwise private part of your or another person's anatomy.

True story.

No, wait. I can't tell that one. Sorry.

Jalapeno paste is designed to allow you to eat VERY spicy food without blistering your lover's(') privates, or your own. Or blinding him/her/them/you. After you make JP, you touch it only with a spoon before you eat it. It's a beautiful, relationship-saving, doctor-visit-preventing thing.

I grow my own peppers and make up, and can, vast batches of this every summer. I have heard that setting out hot peppers next to mild ones -- say, habaneros next to bells -- can make the mild ones hot. Also, the heat in a pepper is there to prevent the fruit from getting fungal infections: thus, peppers grown during wet summers (like this one) are drastically hotter than those grown during dry ones.

Oh, and one reason people like hot peppers is that the pain of eating such things releases endorphins in the brain. In warm countries, the sweat the heat of peppers creates is also cooling. They are amazing little things. More fun facts? Why yes, I have one more! Only mammals experience capsaicin (the "hot" in these peppers) as hot: birds and bugs don't. Thus, you can help keep squirrels out of your feeders with hot pepper-coated seeds (well, except those "Cajun" squirrels [dear GOD, do NOT Google "cajun squirrel" unless you want recipes] -- listen for their zydeco bands to know whether this will work for you). Seriously.

What you'll need:

1) Peppers. This is a picture of the very last batch we could harvest before the first frost killed our plants. It was our sixth or so harvest of this size from these plants. The peppers come from two jalapenos, one habanero, and one plant sold as serrano, but which I think is thai green peppers. Probably there's a pound or a pound and a half here. Note that I have not stemmed or seeded any of these -- they go into the paste whole, without my cutting them. If you have to have less hot pepper paste, I'd suggest using milder peppers (poblanos, for instance) instead of seeding. Or using less paste in a recipe. Seeding means cutting peppers which means getting your hands on them, which means -- danger, Will Robinson. You get the picture.

2) Salt. Use about a tsp or 2 per 3 med. jalapenos. This sounds like a lot, but if you're going to store it, salt is a way to keep the peppers from going rancid. If you're going to use it all at once, you won't need more than a single jalapeno or two and I'd skip the salt entirely -- just salt the dish. I make this en masse so I add a lot of salt.

3) Optionally, olive oil. I add this because it also prevents spoiling and saves me a step in cooking. I don't have to oil the pan at all or as much if I add oil at this juncture. And my peppers stay green in the fridge. Here I've added maybe a quarter cup. Sometimes I add more, but I figured I'd be using this batch up pretty fast.

4) Food processor or blender.

Step one. Wash the peppers.

Step two. Stuff them in the processor/blender.

Step three: Add salt and/or oil.

Step four: Press go-button. Process to a paste. You'll still see seeds, but it should be smoothish.

Step five: Move the paste carefully to a refrigerator-compatible, sealable dish and refrigerate until it turns black and nasty throughout, which means its spoiled. I've been able to keep this for up to a year open in the fridge, with the right amount of salt. By which I mean a lot.

Step six: Rinse everything carefully and wash in a hot, soapy medium. Wash your hands. If you think you got some on you, lick that part. If you tongue heats up (slowly, painfully), wash that part again with hot water and soap. The heat in peppers is oily, so it takes lipid-busters to get it off.

You're done.

One of Chuck's favorite ways to eat this is by the cafe-spoonful, on top of cream cheese (they have a festival!), on top of a cracker. His eyes water. It's fun to watch.

There you go.