In season: Sweet potatoes

I’ve said it before: I never met a sweet potato I didn’t like. Cut into wedges and roasted with rosemary and salt, baked and sprinkled with brown sugar and pecans, served in a pie or baked into pound cake, a sweet potato is always delicious. Even a cold baked sweet potato has a wonderful caramelized quality I find irresistible.

Brennan Washington of Phoenix Gardens in Lawrenceville agrees. He especially likes them combined with other fall vegetables like butternut squash.

“You can make a wonderful soup with apples, butternut squash and sweet potatoes. Boil them up, puree and add a little cream, it’s fantastic,” he said.

Washington has been growing sweet potatoes on the farm for the last two years. He offers his sweet potatoes through a Community Supported Agriculture program on the farm, and will be selling them in his new retail space, Lawrenceville Fresh Mart, in the Honest Alley Emporium in downtown Lawrenceville.

“Sweet potatoes are a pretty low maintenance crop, fairly easy to grow,” said Washington. He grows a variety called ‘Beauregard’, a heavy yielding variety developed at Louisiana State University, in about a dozen raised 50-square-foot beds.

Sweet potatoes are planted from slips, not seed. If you have a sweet potato around for a while, sometimes it will start sending up shoots. Those shoots are also called slips. Take those slips and plant them in the ground and in a few months time you could be harvesting your own crop. Slips planted in June will yield a fall harvest.

Washington gathers his sweet potatoes right after the first frost. “Frost makes the sugar concentrate in the tubers and they taste better. In Georgia, we can usually get away with just keeping the sweet potatoes in the ground until we need them, but to be safe, we pull them up in case we get a freeze. We had a class come over for a field day and they helped dig them up. We had some [potatoes] that weighed close to 3 pounds,” Washington said. Stored dry, the fall harvest will keep fine for the whole winter.

“Our customers come looking for sweet potatoes in the fall, especially close to the holidays. We talk with them about how to candy sweet potatoes or make soup, but my favorite way to cook them is just to rub them with a little olive oil and bake. Served with a little butter, that’s like heaven to me,” Washington said.

Sweet potatoes serve up beta-carotene and vitamins C and B6 along with iron, thiamine, niacin, manganese, copper, phosphorus and calcium. A medium-sized sweet potato has only 130 calories and almost 4 grams of dietary fiber.

What’s happening at local farmers markets

Saturday, last day for Peachtree Road Farmers Market. For information: www.peachtreeroadfarmersmarket.com.

For sale

Fruit and nuts: apples, pears, pecans

Vegetables: arugula, Asian greens, beets, bok choy, broccoli, broccoli raab, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, chard, collards, cucumbers, garlic, ginger, kale, leeks, lettuce, micro greens, mizuna, mushrooms, mustard greens, peppers, potatoes, pumpkins, radishes, spinach, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, turnips, winter squash

From local reports

Lemon-Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Hands on: 15 minutes

Total time: 1 hour

Serves: 8

For those of you who like your sweet potatoes candied, here’s a variation on the usual cinnamon and orange theme. In their cookbook, Peacock and Lewis note they usually don’t like to boil sweet potatoes, but in this case, parboiling and then roasting allows the lemon and nutmeg flavors to really permeate the dish.

3 medium sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds), cut in half

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

In a large saucepan, cover unpeeled sweet potatoes with water and bring to a boil. Simmer 20 minutes or until potatoes are just tender but not soft. Drain the potatoes and let them cool.

While potatoes are cooking, in a medium saucepan, combine water, sugar and salt and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes, remove from heat and stir in lemon juice, butter and nutmeg.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease an 8-by-8-inch baking dish.

Peel the sweet potatoes and cut into quarters or sixths. Arrange in prepared baking dish in a single layer. Pour the lemon-flavored syrup over them and bake, basting every 10 minutes. Bake 30 to 45 minutes or until syrup is bubbling. Serve hot.

Adapted from The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock (Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95)