The Carb That Cures Cravings: Dried Sweet 'Taters

Editorial note:  I've talked to many people who have expressed frustration in getting that magical crunchy and chewy texture after baking.  After getting them all prepped, it's really lame to ruin a batch and end up w/ burnt sweet potato char-crisps.  So after much experimentation, I believe I've fine-tuned the cooking process.  So you don't have to search for it, I'll lay it out here in the beginning.

Once you prepare the pan with butter or oil and cinnamon or whatever spice you want, put the pan in the oven for 45 minutes at 325.  It could be that you could use 50 or 55 minutes; this depends on how even your oven heats and how many trays you are cooking at a time.  I cook 3 trays at a time in a convection oven and 45 minutes works for me.

When the buzzer sounds, take out the trays and check to see which ones are done.  Usually at the initial buzzer, very few are done.  Perhaps 1 in 10 or so are ready.  The way I tell if they are ready is by lightly pressing down on them. They will be hot, but if I can push on it and there's no mushiness at all, then they are done.  Even a tiny bit of mushiness is okay if it's on a small part of the Tater.  I take them off the silpat and place them on a cooling rack.  They will continue to harden a bit on the cooling rack, so what you pull off the silpat is not what you end up with.  Interestingly, putting them in the fridge re-softens them a bit.

After this initial check, set the timer for 10 minutes and put 'em back into the oven.  Repeat the process as needed.  I'll often move some less done ones to the edges of my baking trays as well.  In my experience, I pull off 10% during the first check, 25% during the second check, 55% during the third, and the final 10% after the final 10 minutes.

Of course, the thinner you slice them, the shorter the cooking time.  The more consistent you slice them, the fewer 10 minute intervals you need.  The more even  your oven heats, the fewer intervals you'll need.

If this sounds like a lot of work to you, well, that's because it kinda is.  In my mind, it's worth it because these have replaced so many snacks in my life.  I need sugary carbs in my life at least a little bit.  These do so much less damage than anything else that they're worth keeping around the house for me.  Hope you enjoy them!  Now, on with the recipe and quick lesson in fructose metabolism.

Have you ever found yourself demolishing a large bag of Sour Patch Kids or Starbursts and decided to stop because you were just full? If you're at all like me, a recovering candy addict, the answer is no. I've reluctantly put down the bag of sour/sweet goodness because I was sick to my stomach, or because I had accumulated an embarrassingly large display of wrappers, or because it seemed my ratio of swollen to nonswollen tastebuds was nearing 1:1. But I've never stopped because I was full.


Come to find out that "neverfull" feature of the fruity goodness I used to inhale is actually a byproduct of how my body digests the addictive morsels. So, really, it's not my fault, it's the fault of my metabolic pathway and how my body deals with fructose overload.

While a little bit of fructose is okay, the standard American diet includes way too much of it, particularly in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Even sucrose (white sugar) is half fructose. All this fructose is problematic for you liver, which is the only place it is metabolized. When it gets full, all that extra fructose runs amuck in your bloodstream, turning into triglycerides while, unlike glucose, not suppressing ghrelin (the hormone that tells your body you've eaten enough). Furthermore, all those extra triglycerides also mess with leptin secretion, another hormone that regulates satiety.

All that to say that foods high in fructose don't make you full. It's fine for mouth-exercise but if you want your body to feel satisfied from a meal or snack, minimize the fructose.

At this point you should be starting to anticipate the magic of the "Dried Sweet Tater". Everybody needs a snack; something they can grab and consume without a lot of prep time. This is particularly important after a workout, when muscle glycogen stores are depleted and there is strategic benefit to triggering a bit of an insulin spike. It's counterproductive to replenish your liver glycogen at the expense of muscle glycogen, so you should favor carbs that contain higher amounts of glucose and lower fructose.

It also helps when the carbs are super yummy. Sweet potatoes fit the bill.  They are sweet, but that sweetness comes almost entirely from glucose.  Seriously, 200 calories worth of sweet potatoes has as much a little more than 1 gram of fructose, or about as much as 200 calories worth of alfalfa sprouts.  Granted, too much glucose can be bad too, but you're less likely to load up on glucose because it promotes leptin and suppresses ghrelin, i.e. your body recognizes that it's eating something and gets full.

Okay enough science.  Suffice to say that DSTs have become a staple around our house, universally loved by all. As a family of 7, we burn through them pretty quick, but at least it's a snack I can feel good about feeding my kids.  I'll be honest though; Amy and usually get most of them.

Cast of characters:

 

• Sweet potatoes. I thought these were yams, but apparently they are sweet potatoes. Whatever, I don't really care. Just get the orange ones. The yellow ones don't survive being sliced after being baked and cooked.
• Cinnamon. I've read that it improves insulin sensitivity. It's also delicious.
• Coconut oil OR butter. If you're whole30ing, strict or can't handle dairy fats, you'll need the oil. I used to prefer butter, but then I tried the good stuff.

I'll never use butter again. The gold label virgin coconut oil (left) is just too good. It imparts a subtle coconut taste that rounds out the flavor of the DST in a truly marvelous way. The expeller-pressed variety will work, but, buy design, it lacks the coconut flavor. If you have the good stuff on hand, this recipe is worth it.

First you need to bake the sweet potatoes. I spread out a piece of aluminum foil (otherwise you get nasty drippings that are super hard to clean) on a middle rack and bake as many as I can fit on there for about an hour at 350. Sometimes I'll even rock two trays.

You want them soft and you want it so the skins easily pull away from the sides. After baking, I find it works best to peel them as soon as they are cool enough to work with. The hotter they are, the easier the peels come off. If you can't get to it, letting them sit in the oven overnight is fine.

Now you have to peel them. If you baked them long enough, you should be able to get most of the peel off with your fingers. Use a knife for any stubborn bits. This should leave you with a dish that looks like this:

Note that this amount will produce many pans of Dried Potatoes.  Another name for this is a dish full of awesome.

Now you need to slice them and arrange them on a baking sheet. I also like to use one of those liners (Silpat is what I use) to make removal of the finished product easier. I cut them about 1/2 a centimeter thick. You want a uniform thickness if possible and I find 1/2 cm gives me enough potato to keep it from becoming a mess when I transfer pieces to the pan. I like to arrange them flat side up.

Keep in mind that the more uniform the thickness, the more consistent the results will be when you bake them. If they are all over the map in terms of size, you'll end up with some magically chewy DSTs and some less-than-stellar crunchy ones and some not-as-good-as-it-could-be soft ones.

Now, melt your butter or coconut oil and paint the potato slices with fat using a pastry brush. They will glisten with goodness. All that glucose plus some hard-to-find medium chain triglycerides... this is truly better living through science.

Now give it a healthy dusting of cinnamon. I load up on it.  I mean have you heard how good cinnamon is for you?  As long as you aren't eating it in "roll" form, this stuff helps improve insulin sensitivity, lowers LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), lowers tryglycerides, and  helps migranes, coughs, colds, and toothaches.  So load up; it's good for you.

Then back to the oven it goes for the "drying". This is the tricky part. I've experimented with various time and temperature domains in order to find something repeatable.

Once you prepare the pan with butter or oil and cinnamon or whatever spice you want, put the pan in the oven for 45 minutes at 325. It may be that you could do 50 or 55 minutes; this depends on how even your oven heats and how many trays you are cooking at a time. I cook 3 trays at a time in a convection oven and 45 minutes works for me.


When the buzzer sounds, take out the trays and check to see which ones are done. Usually at the initial buzzer, very few are done. Perhaps 1 in 10 or so are ready. The way I tell if they are ready is by lightly pressing down on them. They will be hot, but if I can push on it and there's no mushiness at all, then they are done. Even a tiny bit of mushiness is okay if it's on a small part of the Tater. I take them off the silpat and place them on a cooling rack. They will continue to harden a bit on the cooling rack, so what you pull off the silpat is not what you end up with. Interestingly, putting them in the fridge re-softens them a bit.

After this initial check, set the timer for 10 minutes and put 'em back into the oven. Repeat the process as needed. I'll often move some less done ones to the edges of my baking trays as well. In my experience, I pull off 10% during the first check, 25% during the second check, 55% during the third, and the final 10% after the final 10 minutes.

Of course, the thinner you slice them, the shorter the cooking time. The more consistent you slice them, the fewer 10 minute intervals you need. The more even your oven heats, the fewer intervals you'll need.

If this sounds like a lot of work to you, well, that's because it kinda is. In my mind, it's worth it because these have replaced so many snacks in my life. I need sugary carbs in my life at least a little bit. These do so much less damage than anything else that they're worth keeping around the house for me.

Here's how mine look when they are done. I snagged a few for PWO this morning.

I store them in a ziploc bag. I don't know how long they keep because we've never had a bag last longer than a few days. They are amazing post-workout and you won't believe how much satiety you get from something so sweet.

Enjoy.  I pretty much live on these right now.  They are my favorite food in the whole world and before them, I was never too big a fan of sweet potatoes.  If you don't like them, then I would say you're probably doing something wrong.

what was I thinking?

From a recent discussion that took place in my head.

"Oh good! My toddler is happy. He can sit in this chair beside us. We will get all sorts of wonderful school work done while he is happily sitting in this chair. Oh he has a green marker.  Well, normally I would not allow him to have a marker but he is obviously thrilled with the idea of coloring the paper with it which will allow us precious more minutes for grammar, math, reading and language... Hooray for a toddler who can be content!"




30 seconds later....






beach school

Peaceful.

Fun and adventurous.

That is what our homeschool day felt like yesterday afternoon.



Mike was working at home so I was able to leave the nappers with him and pack up my school age kids, a few of our books and head off to the beach.



We even spied a deer in the woods.



We had a great time.  I am so thankful for these special days that I get to spend with my kids!

a typical morning

Let me break it down:

* Ethan is learning a new math concept; I am helping him.

* Luke and I are reading his grammar lesson.

* Luke is also picking blocks up off the floor and putting them on Justus' tray (it is easier for a boy to retain information when his hands are busy).

* Ava is coloring her math page.
* Aidan just finished a typing game on the computer.

* Justus is throwing the blocks at me and complaining about his buckled in situation.

It's crazy. It is a bit tiring. But man, is it worth it. And it's fun too.

Easy Egg Cupcakes

The past year has been quite transformational for my diet. Hopefully I'll be able to go into that in great detail in future posts, but for now I want to tackle one specific issue by offering a recipe.

For starters, I've eliminated nearly all grains, legumes and (most) dairy out of my diet. I eat meat and veggies and some fruit. That's pretty much it. I mix in a few nuts and seeds every now and then but try to stick to meat and veggies. Also I try to minimize polyunsaturated fats and maximize saturated fats. I share that only to throw out a controversial subject with the promise to revisit it in future posts. Eating this way, along with regular exercise at Crossfit X in Barkely Village, has put me in the best shape of my life, surpassing even when I was playing soccer in high school. I can even button size 32 jeans, which I can't ever remember being able to do.

Anyhow, adjusting to this diet hasn't been effortless. Easier than you think, for sure, but not being able to eat much of anything that comes out of a box requires some purposeful living, especially in the area of food preparation.

Anyhow, the specific issue is breakfast.  I love breakfast. I love for it to my biggest and fattiest meal of the day. I don't mind getting up early or doing what it takes to have a good breakfast. I find that when I get a breakfast full of eggs, meat and veggies--and enough fat to cover the food pyrmid--I feel great all day, am barely hungry at lunch and ready for a nice-sized earlyish dinner. It really suits our lifestyle right now. I know that many people place high value on morning sleep and don't feel like undertaking a monumental task of creating a breakfast feast so they find themselves reaching for a bagel or some other form of poison.

This needn't be the case. You just haven't yet been introduced to breakfast cupcakes. I'm about to remove that excuse.

For this meal, you'll need a lot of eggs. For the batch in this series of pictures, I think I used about 36 and that made about 18 cupcakes. I like to crack the eggs into a separate dish and then dump the dish into the main dish. I do this because it sucks to dig a tiny piece of shell out of huge vat of eggs but it's equally lame to get an unnaturally crunchy bite of egg cupcake. Doing this solves both problems.

Then you cut up veggies. Sharpen your knife b/c this is going to take a while.

Mushrooms, jalepenos... yum.

I've also got swiss chard, white onions, other peppers, other peppers, cilantro and probably some other things going into these eggs. My kids prefer just onions, meat and cheese but we were also making part of this batch for my vegetarian sister. She just got a job as a teacher and has some of those time challenges.

So now you sauté up the veggies. I use butter to sauté veggies because (1) butter tastes awesome and (2) I'm trying to maximize saturated fat in my diet. Depending on your preferences, other appropriate oils include bacon or sausage drippings--which would be available because any sane person would include meat in these--or coconut oil if you're trying to avoid dairy fats and meat. Do not use corn/canola/vegetable/etc oil (because it is poison) OR olive oil (because you shouldn't cook at high heat w/ olive oil b/c it oxidizes and attacks your body with free radicals).

Keep in mind the order of sautéing. You want to start out with the things that are tougher or more fibrous, then progressively add things that cook up more quickly. The besting thing is to start w/ bacon or sausage, then add in the veggies until you have a pan full of awesome egg cupcake filling. The fat from the meat is perfect for cooking the veggies.

Now, spray a couple X-Large muffin pans with Pam. You can use other fat to grease the pan if you want but I use Pam b/c it's easy. Also, I generally don't like using nonstick cookware but for occasional baking I guess it's okay. If you have the right muffin pan, it'll nicely hold 1/2 a cup of eggs. That's about 2 eggs.

Dump 1/3 cup of the meat/veggie mix into the egg and that'll push the limits of what you can put in there.

Then, if you want to, you can add a pinch of shredded cheese. I'm a fan of this and so are my kids. If you're not big on dairy than skip it.  If you add it, mix it in a bit.

Into the oven they go. They take about 25 minutes at 350 for two pans. You'll know they are done when the middle doesn't jiggle like liquid. There's a lot of room for error here so don't worry about overcooking them by 5 minutes or so. You won't ruin them.

Let them cool for a few minutes in the muffin pan. Note: we throw away the older-looking muffin pan after this. They fall out of the new pan with nary a trace of cupcake. You end up recovering about 85% of the cupcake w/ the old pan and that includes a decent amount of scraping with a plastic scraper. I think the pans are $14 and they sell them at Haggen. It's worth it to get a new one (or 2).

After cooking them, let them cool on a sheet pan. Once cool, put the sheet pan in the freezer. Overnight should be enough time to freeze them solid. I like to put them in a big freezer bag at this point as that makes them easier to store. In the morning, zap it for 2-3 minutes in the microwave (covered) and enjoy with salsa or some fresh fruit. If you're extra hungry, grab two. For a good lunch at work, bring one in a microwavable dish. It'll stay cold enough until you are able to microwave it at work.

Enjoy! Now you are without excuse.

my boys and science

The "habitat" assignment reads: "Rope off a 1 square-yard area in your backyard and carefully examine it."

This is not exactly how I pictured it. But I like it.

hey momma

Ethan: Hey momma, guess what I am.

Mom: Super man?

Ethan: Nope.

Mom: Spider man, a ninja, a warrior, a super hero....?

Ethan: Nope.

Mom: Well, what are you.

Ethan: (in his "duh" voice) I'm Ethan. With a mask on.

oh man; my littlest man

Can you believe this guy?  He is so squishy and delightful. 

Justus is a complete momma's boy and always wants to be right where I am. 

This is one way that I have found to keep him occupied so that I can get the dishes done or make a meal.

My J-bear.  Busy, busy.  Learning to walk, communicate, make messes, command attention and show love.  {And take really great pictures!}

ava swims

So much of parenting is learning more and more about your children. For the last couple of weeks during swimming lessons I have learned a new side of Ava's personality.

Ava is almost always by my side. In our day to day life she is my buddy, we do almost everything together.

I was therefore very surprised at Ava's independence and outgoing personality at swimming lessons. She went right into the pool on day one, did everything that was asked of her (including several jumps off the diving board) and excelled. She enjoyed every moment of it.

We found it amusing that out of the ten kids in Ava's class (two of which cried the whole time) she was the only girl! Maybe that is why she felt so comfortable! And can you believe how cute this girl is?!