Sweet Potato Adventures (Chow)

The sweet potatoes we bought this Thanksgiving were unusually large. And then NDM's father turned up with two emergency backup sweet potatoes for some reason. The end result was three ginormous leftover sweet potatoes. (I put a quarter in there for context.)

Dish One
First, I thought I'd try a stab at sweet potato cookies.
I creamed ½c butter and ¼c granulated sugar and mixed in ¼c honey, 1t freshly grated nutmeg, 1t lemon peel, and 1 egg.
I grated one half of one of my smaller sweet potatoes, raw, about 1½c, and mixed that in.
Then I mixed together a dry bowl of 2½c all-purpose flour, 1½t baking powder, ½t baking soda, and ¼t salt and blended the whole mess together into a moist cookie dough.
I initially placed rounded balls about the size of walnuts on an ungreased cookie sheet. I baked them for 10m in a 350°F oven. When they were done I removed them to a wire rack for cooling.
When I saw how the first batch looked during cooking, I began to worry about the cookies ending up a bit raw in the center. Subsequent batches, I squished down the balls to make a more traditional cookie shape and to reduce the spherical interior volume.
As it turned out, it didn't make much difference. All of the cookies turned out about the same. They are only slightly sweet and have a delicate sweet potato flavor. They are very moist but have a fairly light consistency. Somewhere between a roll and a cookie, you could probably munch them any time of day. Yummy, but due to their high moisture content even after cooking I doubt they will keep long at all.

One sixth of my sweet potato problem down!

Dish Two

The next day NDM told me she wanted a spinach pasta dish of some kind for dinner. I of course assumed, unvoiced, was the request to jam as much sweet potato in there as humanly possible. Could I stuff all five sixth of my remaining sweet potato problem into a single dinner?

I started out by peeling my remaining sweet potatoes, slicing them up, and jamming them all into my pressure cooker with some water. In about 10 minutes they were done, and I decanted and mashed them and set them aside for cooking.
I decided to try two things, the first being a sweet potato roll to go along with the main dish. To make sure my yeast was mighty, I took ½c 110°F water and dissolved in 2¼t (1 package) active dry yeast and 1T granulated sugar. I let that stand 5m.
While I was waiting, I mixed up 3T melted butter, an additional 3T granulated suagar, 1t salt, and 2 eggs. I added 1½c cooked sweet potato.
After 5m the yeast had made a nice thick bubbly mixture that I folded into my proto-dough.
I added 3c of flour to make a sticky dough, then turned it out onto my counter to knead it a bit. I had miscalculated, and the dough was much too sticky for proper kneading, even with oiled hands. However, I was reluctant to add a lot more flour -- I think I might have even had to double it for a kneadable dough -- and throw off the balance of everything else in the dish. The roll suddenly became easier to make!
I used a scraper to move the dough into an oiled bowl, and manipulated it as well as a could with my club hands to get it greased all over. I covered the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and put it in a warm place to rise for 1h. Then I punched it down and let it rest for a few minutes.
The dough was very sticky and elastic, so I used two teaspoons to shape balls to drop into a small-chambered muffin tray that I normally use to make meatballs. There was a bit too much dough for one tray, so I also made some larger rolls in a normal muffin tray. I sprayed the trays first with an olive oil spray to aid in releasing the rolls.
I baked them in a preheated 375°F oven for 20m. The rolls were slightly difficult to remove and place on a wire rack; I had to use a teaspoon to help me disengage them from the trays. Probably should have used a release agent with some flour in it. The rolls ended up looking gorgeous, and they were delicious.

Dish Three

I had at least 4c of mashed sweet potato remaining for my main dish, and a pack of whole wheat gnocchi in the cupboard. This needed to combine with the two bags of pre-washed spinach I had picked up at the grocery. By this point I was getting a bit burnt out on cooking so I wanted to do something easy.
I raided the freezer for 1 strip of the bacon my wife keeps on hand for when I'm an unusually good boy and diced it fine. I also used a microplane grater on 5 cloves of garlic. I also started a large pot of water boiling for my gnocchi.
I poured about 3T of olive oil in a dutch oven over medium-high heat and threw the bacon and garlic in. I cooked it until just before the garlic was going to smoke; in retrospect, I should have put the bacon in earlier by itself so I could get it even crispier without endangering the garlic. In my defense, I was also wrangling sweet potato rolls at the same time.
Into this I threw handfuls of spinach and wilted it down until all the spinach was in the pot. I love watching spinach reduce and turn bright green! When it was all ready, I melted an extra 2T butter into the pot and then spooned in every last drop of my remaining mashed sweet potato seasoned with about ¾t salt and ½t freshly ground black pepper. I quickly boiled the gnocchi, drained them, and tossed them into the dutch oven as well.
So this was the spinach pasta meal I ended up serving. The store-bought gnocchi was surprisingly good, but the whole pasta dish itself I'd have to say was simply OK. It probably would have been greatly improved by more bacon more cooked, and perhaps some parmesan cheese as well. The sweet potato rolls were awesome.

And that is how easy it is to get rid of sweet potatoes!