The Only Newsletter I Care About This Week
Roasted Sweet Potatoes
by Me
A simple recipe with big opinions and delicious results.
INGREDIENTS
Sweet Potato(es), sliced in half the long way
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
INSTRUCTIONS
400-425º oven.
Drizzle your sweet potato on both sides. Actually, what's a word that is more than 'drizzle' but less than 'pour.' Adorn? Bless? Gently coat? Definitely bring a sweater but probably not a coat?
Salt and pepper both sides. This is when a skilled recipe writer will tell you to designate one olive oil hand and one seasoning hand. And I agree! But has anyone ever managed to successfully do this whole step without momentarily forgetting and flipping your oiled sweet potato with your seasoning hand? I haven't. A very real step in this recipe is the 3-5 trips to the sink to wash your hands of olive oil so you can grab large pinches of salt without making your salt well yucky. Don't feel bad about this. Life is too short.
As a matter of fact, Don't let anyone tell you how to use your hands.
I'm going to encourage you to confidently use both hands (and any other extremities you see fit) to make sure that olive oil, salt and pepper are all evenly distributed on all sides of your sweet potatoes. Dry hand be damned!
With all hands involved, place your sweet potato slices cut side down on your QUARTER SHEET PAN. What is a quarter sheet pan? Never met her? She's just like a regular sheet pan (aka cookie sheet) but is half the size. Is the pan size going to make or break anything here? No. But here's my little PSA for the day: If you're not consistently living, loving and laughing with a quarter sheet pan in your life, I honestly don't know what to tell you. It is small, it is efficient and 90% of the time, it is all the sheet pan you need. Also, I'm not a millionaire so I truly wouldn't know, but apparently it does fit into Dishwasher, if you're the kind of person who wears fine jewelry with regularity.
Note to the single people: There aren't many things in this life where the world says "Here. We're going to actually make this just for you. You're a party of 1? Great! Better, actually! Use this smaller sheet pan instead!" I would blame the patriarchy, but that's so 2016. I blame Big Kitchen. Single comrade, take advantage of the gift that is the QSP! Use them to bake a single cookie at 11pm on a weekday after watching 5 hours of F Boy Island! Brag about them to your spit-up covered friends who have 100 kids and live under the tyranny of extra large commercial sheet pans! Eat your dinner straight off of them with a fork while you sit on your countertop like the cool girl in a 90s movie instead of a plate because the QSP basically is a plate and you live your life by your own rules, baby!!
(These Great Jones ones are v cute. Reminder: September 24.)
Anyway, delete dating apps off your phone as you slide the QSP in the oven for 25 minutes. What you do with that 25 minutes is your business, but for the rest of my life, I will be wondering and would be thrilled to find out what you do with that 25 minutes. My email is open 24/7/365 to hear. I'll start: sit down on the couch and re-download dating apps.
After 25 minutes, take the pan out of the oven and eat them. I usually just eat them as is (what can I say? I am but a humble minimalist queen.) But if you're in The Mood for MoreTM and are feeling emotionally ready to take on the emotional labor of a toppings joureny, it really a choose your own adventure situation. My one recommendation there -- as the sweet potatoes have now roasted themselves into what I would equate to the texture of a delicious Tempur-Pedic mattress, I encourage topping them with something sort of crunchy. Or crispy. Or chewy. You're in the market for a texture journey here. For example - NOT an avocado. Too much soft. You're not a baby.
*I'm writing this at a coffee shop and forgot to write down the recipe for the peanut chili crunch pictured above from Cook This Book. If you want it, please email me and I'd be happy to send it to you later.
Keeping my impassioned opinions more centered on quarter sheet pans today, but I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who responded so overwhelmingly kindly and lovingly to my newsletter last week. I would say "I can't tell you what it meant to me," but I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't use 100 words to say something that could have been said in 10. So here's my attempt.
What it means to me:
I'm not alone
Health stuff sucks, but it sucks less when you're not alone
Being an active listener (reader) is an act of love
Sharing takes a bravery that I rarely regret
You see me
You want to see me more
The world is polarized, but really we all just want to see each other too
Thank you