sweet potato pancakes.

not everyone is a fan of the sweet potato. for some, this dense, orange root vegetable pales in comparison to its waxy, white tubular sister that most of us grew up on. in most households, sweet potatoes only made the appearace at thanksgiving, a canned syrupy sort topped with sticky-sweet marshmallows and baked to a crisp. in my family we did not participate in this sacrilege. sweet potatoes were always respected as highly as white potatoes; whipped until smooth and generously flavored with butter, cream and warm spices of cinammon and nutmeg.
i grew up looking forward to their appearance come turkey day and my sisters and i would usually fight over them; with silent, skinny and bottomless-stomach kate leading the charge. sarah and i are really just amateuers when it comes to our ability to injest large quantities of food. kate is a professional. and sweet potatoes may have started her on a quite valiant sweet potato career.

while i've made whipped sweet potatoes and sweet potato fries, i've never made sweet potato pancakes. my parents make excellent sweet potato pancakes or latkes as they're really called; but after consulting a few recipes online, i decided to wing it on my own before consulting the experts. i can only hope kate will approve.

first i started out with 2 sweet potatoes and a dream.

trader joes is pretty smart because they sell these semi-mini but not really mini but not really full-sized sweet potatoes in a sack of six. and each clocks in at only 100 calories. pretty nice snack if you ask me. so i got to work, peeled them up and then grated them with my handy microplane which got me this little pile. *note, after grating them i put the sweet potato mush into a towel and squeezed out a lot of extra water.*

then while my skillet warmed with a good tablespoon of canola oil and a few spritzes of cooking spray, i grabbed some additions to pancake up the sweet potatoes.

i added 1 tablespoon of flour, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, 1/8 teaspoon each baking soda, cinammon, nutmeg, salt and pepper. at this point the mix wasn't really "mixing," which to me meant i needed a binder. so of course: the egg.

i added in just the egg white and the batter was formed. then i placed tablespoon-sized scoops into the sizzling oil and semi-flattened them out.

these cooked about 4-5 minutes before i flipped them to reveal a crispy crust.

at least another 5 minutes on the other side if you want these nice and crispy, which you do, trust me! and the canola oil really was essential in the cripy factor. also these must, must be eaten when piping hot with a dash of salt.


also, nelson seemed to think apple sauce would be a nice addition to these...
ha! i always knew he wanted to be jewish:)
now i must consult the experts for their tired but true recipe.