It’s peak sweet potato season… and whiskey is in season all year round. 

Ingredients

– 1 large Sweet Potato, peeled and cubed
– 1 Apple, peeled and cubed
– 1/4 cup Heavy Cream
– 4 Tbsp Butter
– 2 Tbsp Brown Sugar
– 3 Tbsp Whiskey
– Salt & Pepper (to taste)

Directions

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add sweet potatoes and boil until soft. In a pan, melt 2 Tbsp of butter. Add add apples and saute until slightly soft, but not mushy. Drain sweet potatoes and put back into pot. Add sauteed apples and cream and mash until potatoes are smooth. The apples will retain their shape. Salt to taste and keep warm as you make the sauce. In a saute pan, melt remaining butter. Add brown sugar and whiskey and whisk together over low/medium heat until it reduces a bit. Serve sweet potatoes hot topped with mascarpone and drizzled with whiskey sauce.

The motivation to start this blog was not only to try new vegetarian dishes, but to expand my cooking repertoire in general. Though I’ve been cooking (mostly poorly) since I was a kid, there’s still many areas where I had yet to venture into… And as a stubborn person who hates being told “you can’t do that,” I’ve been trying things I would normally write off (souffle, nutella, etc.) Today, it was hot sauce, semi-inspired by the amount of tweets I’ve had to read about SXSW this week. Austin was the first place I’d encountered a store dedicated exclusively to hot sauce. Being the indecisive person I am, I walked out without any souvenirs.


Whiskey Hot Sauce (via Georgia Pellegrini)
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 2 tablespoons chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, roughly chopped ¼ cup Serrano peppers, seeds removed and diced ½ cup carrot, peeled and finely diced ½ cup onion, finely diced 1/4 cup whiskey Juice of 1 lemon ½ cup brown sugar or molasses ¼ teaspoon ground cumin 1 tablespoon salt
In a saucepan, heat the vinegar with 1 cup of water and add the diced peppers, Chipotle peppers, onion, and carrot. Let them simmer on low heat covered for 15-20 minutes to soften.Add the remaining ingredients to the saucepan, stir and return to a simmer for 3-5 minutes.
Puree in a blender or food processor, transfer to a glass jar and let cool. Store in the refrigerator for up to one year.
I used 1/2 cup of Serrano pepper instead of a 1/4 cup, 2 tbls of honey (too much) and 1/4 a tsp of cayenne pepper. This recipe is fairly sweet, so the cayenne was a needed bite…The overall taste experience was “sweet, sorta smokey-spicy/sweet-spicy-OOO-SPICY.” Also, I used a hand blender to grind everything to death, and then put it through a strainer (hence the first picture) to get any seeds out.
Nika was kind enough to be a taste tester and helped me dig through the first container of sauce (armed with some panfried breadcrumb tofu.) This recipes makes about 1 1/2 cups of hot sauce.
Outside of cooking, here’s some interesting things from this week…