Potato Candy

  

  
If your Mom is an old lady from the southeastern states, you have probably eaten this stuff around christmas. It is mouthwringingly sweet, and has a very peculiar texture which is at once chalky and creamy, kind of like fondant. It has peanut butter in it.Yes, it is made with a potato. There are lots of recipes online for it, but I still have no idea what the origin of the recipe could be. It's one of those things where you think about it and go 'Seriously? Who does that?'

1 baked russet potato
2 lbs powdered sugar, more or less
1 tsp vanilla
peanut butter

Peel and mash the potato. Add the vanilla and half the sugar. Mix until smooth, then gradually add more sugar until you have a stiff, rather sticky dough.

Roll the dough out between sheets of waxed paper until it is 1/8" thick, then spread a thin layer of peanut butter on it. Roll the dough up into a rope, then cut it into slices.

That's really it, but there is some stuff that is useful to know:

1. You can microwave the potato, but I think it would be better to actually bake it.
2. That's because you want to have the mashed potato be fairly dry, and also the baking will make a more pronounced potato flavor. It is Potato Candy, after all.
3. Even so, the first few cups of sugar will melt into a soup right away. That's normal. Just keep adding more.
4. Making a drier dough will make it less sticky, but it will be harder to roll out that way.
5. As you roll it out, peel the paper off the dough and rotate it frequently. It will come out smoother that way.
6. Roll slowly and gently. Violent treatment will cause the dough to resist handling.

One of the most interesting characteristics of this stuff is the handling property of the dough whereby it behaves like a solid and breaks into chunks if you cut or twist it, but it will ooze slowly through your fingers if you squeeze it gently. If you've ever played with cornstarch and water, or sand on a beach, the principle is the same. There is some cornstarch in powdered sugar, but that isn't what's making it behave that way.

When you first put the sugar in the mashed potato, the tiny sugar particles rapidly dissolve in the moisture from the potato. Eventually, the small amount of water present will no longer be able to dissolve any more sugar, and the sugar particles will remain intact, suspended in liquid, just like raw cornstarch (which is insoluble) in water. There is some kind of fancy physics explanation for why particles suspended in liquid behave that way, but I don't know what it is. I think it has to do with surface tension, but I could be totally wrong, so don't rely on me about that.

I only make this stuff about once every 4 or 5 years because I have to have forgotten that my sweet tooth is not powerful enough for me to want to eat more than 3 pieces of it. I did have one more incentive this time though: I bought a vintage potato press. It's totally neato. You fill the removable can with cooked potato, crank the handle down, and it instantly extrudes a whole recipe worth of perfectly mashed potato. I doubt it will see much use for potato candy in the future, but I do want to try making lefse. If I get up the nerve, I'll tell you about it.

Ta-Da!

Green Beans

Green beans are really only appealing when they are cooked in one of 2 ways: either barely blanched enough to make them go bright green and then shocked in cold water to stop the cooking, or really, REALLY cooked. This is one option for the latter. Interesting cultural side note: hillbillies in Floyd County, Virginia, and hillbillies in Shandong Province, China, cook their green beans in exactly the same way. Here's how they do it-

Get a mess of green beans, an onion, and a good sized bit of bacon. Cut up the bacon and onions, put them in a pot with the beans and enough water to about half-cover the lot. Bring the pot to a boil. Cover it, reduce it to a simmer and add a few pinches of salt. If you want, you can put in a little bit of pepper. Stir it every once in a while, but mostly just leave the pot to simmer until the beans have nearly dried out, and you can almost hear them sizzling on the bottom of the pot. Take them off the heat, leave them to cool for a minute then stir them once to get the flavors well mixed and to take up any brown bits from the pan.

Practical notes: Use really good bacon. I used 2 slices of TJ's to about a pound of beans. Also, taste for salt after about half an hour, they take a good bit. It encourages Maillard reactions. They should take around an hour to cook.

Beans cooked this long develop nutty, roasty flavors that go really well with the smoky and meaty flavor of the bacon, but they retain their characteristic 'beany' taste as well. Also, long cooking makes them very tender, which is enhanced by the bacon fat. They are quite buttery, a satisfying thing to eat in the winter.

If you live in Floyd, you can eat them with biscuits, or rolls, cornbread, mashed potatoes, homemade pickles, and pork chops or chicken if you are at all reasonably prosperous. If you live in Shandong,  you can eat them with rolls, possibly  boiled potatoes, homemade pickles, and pork chops if you can afford it. But if you haven't got any of those things on hand, don't let that stop you from eating green beans. Really, there isn't anything they don't go with. I get creeped out by cooking raw meat in my own apartment, (the packaging is nasty) so I ate mine with a cup of tea and some gingerbread.