Eat And Drink The Sweet Potato: Over-complicating Simple Shit
So, here was an idea that rapidly scurried down a rabbithole of excessive preparation for a snack and a drink. I started with the simple need to use up a couple of Sweet Potatoes before they grew into a new ecosystem and it flourished into an all day event making garnishes and syrups for a complimentary cocktail and installing a new feature on the site to formally showcase recipe cards. I even missed dinner. For this reason, I’ve started a new post category on this site called “Over-complicating Simple Shit”
In this first installment of Over-complicating Simple Shit I miss dinner because I spent the whole day making a snack.
Luckily, I planned ahead when preparing the food and was able to do everything concurrently. First, I’ll post links to the 3 recipes I used here, bastardized from different ones around the webs.
Twice-Baked Brown Sugar Bacon Sweet Potatoes the only change I made was using premade, crumbled Candied Bacon to sprinkle on top.
The Sweet Potato Cocktail the only change I made from the Original was garnishing it with Candied Bacon instead of Nutmeg
Candied Bacon the common, uniting ingredient after, well, Sweet Potato.
I don’t know what triggered it, but for some reason when I decided to make a simple Sweet Potato I wanted to have this nice snack paired with a new drink of some kind. When the first strike of my Google-Fu was thrown when I searched for “Sweet Potatoes paired cocktail”, the responses pointed to the above (Sweet Potato) Casserole Cocktail. In the instructions on how to make the Sweet Potato Syrup for the cocktail, it tells you to bake a Sweet Potato and scoop out only 2 tablespoons of the flesh leaving the rest of the Sweet Potato for other things. I figured, since I was already going to start scooping shit, I’d twice bake the Sweet Potato and whatever was lost in the volume of making the Syrup would be made up in extra stuff added to the mash before re-adding it to the skins and re-baking.
When deciding how to modify the drink a bit, I noticed that many of the various Twice Baked Sweet Potato recipes online called for Bacon. One had you mix some Brown Sugar with the Bacon before crumbling it on top, but I thought, why not just make some glorious Brown Sugar Candied Bacon, crumble some for the food, save a whole strip for the cocktail, and eat whatever is left over while I spend the whole day making a “quick” snack.
The tricky part was planning out the timing of when everything should cook. The Syrup depended on the cooked Sweet Potato and had to chill before serving while both the finished cocktail and the dish depended on the Candied Bacon which also needed time to cool down and stiffen up a bit before crumbling or placing in the drink. While the Sweet Potatoes were first cooking, I started on the candied bacon having them on a cooling rack before taking the Sweet Potatoes out to scoop out the flesh setting some aside for the syrup while mixing the rest of the ingredients for twice baking and making the syrup before the Sweet Potatoes finish so I could mix and garnish the drink while the snack was still warm. All in all it was a 7 hour project from conceptualization to cooking to website enhancing to cleanup, which was a great, sticky mess. And, I missed dinner.
