Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Cooking organic sweet potato leaf

We harvested our organic sweet potato today (there are a couple of more detailed recipes on that post too). One lesson to be learnt is that it needs a climbing frame - it was crawling all over the ground looking for something to climb up; also, the leaves of one of the plants were all small and not a deep green - I think there was too much shade.

We didn't get a lot out of it...


I separated out the older leaves, those with holes and browned edges, and kept only the tender stalks - about enough for one portion. All the rest went to the vermicomposting box.


It's often cooked with garlic and lard: we don't have any lard so I tried with some chopped chinese sausage, couple of cracked garlic cloves, and a dried chili. Fried that in oil for a while then threw in the leaves


Added some chinese wine and soy sauce. Too much soy sauce! You always have to watch out in stir fries not to overdo the soy sauce...


Well - it was not really a success :( Too oily and too salty - but the basic principle of the recipe was good. But the sweet potato leaf was still good - tender and pleasantly non-bitter (not exactly sweet though, if you see what I mean).









5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think u need a big bunch to cook the potato leaf, that was too little, that's y it turn out oily and salty... haha

Unknown said...

Love stir fries! We used to have sweet potato in our garden. My mother used to steam a bunch of them ...you brought back the taste of childhood...!

Anonymous said...

*kennhyn* - yes that makes sense :)

*Kanak Hagjer* -Steaming sounds more healthy :)

HappySurfer said...

Sorry, I couldn't hold back a chuckle looking at the finished product. Still, it looks edible.

It's not supposed to be bitter nor sweet, despite its name. In fact, soy sauce is not needed. The simplest method is to stir-fry with garlic and salt though it's popularly done with dried prawns and belacan (shrimp paste) and chillies, shallots, ginger, garlic - all pounded or blended together. Add salt to taste. Heat up oil in wok and fry the paste until fragrant and then put in the leaves.

julian said...

hehe :) ya it looks pretty pathetic! You've got a good point re the soy sauce - without that it would have been a lot less salty