The Leftovers: Roasted Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Spread

I spent yesterday at my sister's place, kissing my niece's hands and telling her I love her. We showed her the Christmas lights and she stared in amazement at the colors. We ate off of paper plates on the couch and my mother said she was thankful that I was home now. I tried to fight off a nap and nearly lost. I was in bed by ten after finishing the first season of Fargo.

Today, I'm baking alone. I have the house to myself and I'm going to clean up my mess and then make a new one, I'm sure. But, like last year, here is a recipe for some of your leftovers - this time with sweet potatoes.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Spread

This recipe is very forgiving, so feel free to use any kind of goat cheese you'd like. Further, this recipe outlines if you do not already have roasted sweet potatoes on hand -- if you do, then just use a cup or a cup and a half of your leftovers.

Ingredients:

• 1 large sweet potato, cut in half and pierced with a fork
• 1 TB olive oil
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• 4 oz creamy goat cheese (I used Vermont Creamery's Spreadable Goat Cheese)
• 1 TB parsley
• 2 TB honey
• Pinch of salt and pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 425*F and lightly grease a shallow casserole dish or baking pan
2. Place your sweet potato halves skin-side down in your prepared pan and drizzle with olive oil and pat a quarter cup of sugar on each
3. Roast for 30 minutes or until fork-tender
4. Remove from oven, allow to cool
5. Remove from skins and place meat of your sweet potatoes and the caramelized sugar in a food processor
6. Throw in remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. You may want to add a bit of greek yogurt to this if it is not as smooth as you would like
7. Store in an airtight container for up to a week, use on toast for breakfast

It's Finally Fall! Roasted Sweet Potato Monkey Bread

There wasn’t an autumn in California, only an endless summer and a few mornings with frost on the windshield. I wasn’t used to it, I never adapted to it. I hated it, the long drag of the same temperature. I got rid of all my sweaters the first month we moved out there. It never felt like home.

Autumn in Pennsylvania is different. Bright and dark all at once. Desaturated in the morning fog and then it burns up to reveal patches of leaves missing from the oak and apple trees in the backyard. It’s Fall now, with its promise of apple cider and corn mazes. Its promise of coffee to warm your one hand; a boy’s hand to warm your other one. A promise you can’t take for granted, because it’s a type of beauty that is a whisper, a mumble, and gone in an instant.

It’s the beginning of the time when we leave the windows open all day and night. When my mother lights apple-scented candles and the cat in the windowsill lazily watches the leaves fall to the ground. I used to ask for a pumpkin pie on my birthday instead of cake. I used to ask to stay home with her instead of going to school, to go for walks and jump in the leaves. Then come inside to fresh bread or cake or anything to warm us up.

Fall has always been magic. It’s my first time having one in four long years.

Roasted Sweet Potato Monkey Bread

Pillowy, sweet, delicate, yet filling. The very essence of comfort food.

Ingredients for Roasted Sweet Potato Puree:

• 1 large sweet potato
• 1 TB olive oil
• 2 TB brown sugar, dark
• Pinch of sal

Directions for Roasted Sweet Potato Puree:

1. Preheat oven to 425*F
2. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil
3. Cut your sweet potato in half and cover each side with oil, sugar, and salt
4. Roast for 15 minutes or until tender and caramelized
5. Remove from oven, allow to cool
6. Scoop contents into a food processor and blend until smooth; alternatively, smash with a fork
7. Use for below monkey bread recipe

Ingredients for Roasted Sweet Potato Monkey Bread:

• 2 cups lukewarm water
• 5 teaspoons active dry yeast (my absolute favorite brand to use is Red Star Yeast)
• 1 ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup white sugar
• Roasted sweet potato puree (see above, yields about 1-1 ½ cups)
• 1 egg
• 4 TB melted butter
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• 5 – 5 ½ cups AP flour
• ½ cup dark brown sugar
• ¼ cup walnuts or pecans
• 1 cup mini marshmallow

Directions:

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, pour in your water, yeast, salt, and sugar. Allow to sit for 5 minutes until the top of the water is marked with bubbles
2. Turn mixer on medium-low and add puree, egg, butter, and vanilla. Mix until all is incorporated
3. Turn mixer speed down to low, add flour one cup at a time. You may need a little more or a little less of the flour, depending on altitude. You will know when you have enough when dough is not sticky and pulls slightly away from the sides of the bowl
4. With floured hands, change the paddle attachment for the dough hook and turn on medium speed to knead for 3 minutes
5. When three minutes are done, turn out onto a floured work surface and knead by hand for an additional five minutes until springy and elastic
6. Place in a well-greased bowl to rest for one hour with a tea towel to cover
7. During this time, preheat oven to 350*F and grease a standard bundt pan with a lot of butter and flour. Pour ¼ of your brown sugar and a few marshmallows and nuts into the bottom of your bundt (which, when inverted, will be the top)
8. When hour is done, punch dough down (it will inflate quite a bit) and use a sharp knife or bench knife to cut into small one-inch balls. To do so, cut dough into fourths, then cut each of these fourths into eight equal pieces (for a total of 32 pieces). Roll each one in your hand into a ball and place into bundt
9. Repeat this for the remaining dough, alternating layers of dough with remaining sugar, nuts, and marshmallows
10. Allow to sit for 10 minutes to rest a bit then pop into the oven to bake (here, I suggest placing on a cookie sheet to avoid any messes in your oven—the marshmallow can get sticky!)
11. Bake for 35 minutes or until golden brown and puffed. Your house will have the aromatic, yeasty smell of fresh bread and a slightly caramelized smell of brown sugar
12. Remove from oven and allow to cool for about 10 minutes. With oven mitts, invert bundt onto a plate and gently remove pan, leaving only your doughy hodge podge of marshmallow, sugar, and bread
13. Serve as immediately as possible, but definitely with a day or two 

Thank you to Red Star Yeast for sponsoring this post. I believe in using quality products when it comes to baking and I am always confident my dough will rise beautifully with Red Star! Check out the active dry yeast I used for this recipe and others on their website, follow them on instagram and like their Facebook!

Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls for Thanksgiving

In two days, I’ll drive out to the desert to give thanks. Coyotes might howl into the basin that night, but I’ll call my mom around noon her time to say I love you. It’s all so familiar and so different now, how three years have changed me since I came to the California. People say the coast is forgiving of your past; but for me, it’s the only thing I’m clinging onto anymore, the one thing I refuse to give up. I did my own sort of pilgrimage and found myself on the border between two worlds, between two selves. The shorelines blur between me and the Pacific and I’m still dipping in to see which one is colder.

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I’m clinging to my past. My mother in sweat pants. We’d eat at three. My dad would keep the television on in the background. It could drown out the silence at the table some years. There are five of us in my family; we hardly have anything in common. My mom would wear her sweatpants until the dinner was done, she’d change into jeans and we would pray for the first and last time that whole year. My sister liked lasagna, so we had lasagna one year. My mother kept the pumpkin rolls moist in damp paper towels and one Thanksgiving I ate nothing but mashed potatoes and bread. I wasn’t grateful for anything then, I lived with the idea that it was deserving of everything handed to me. Food sat stacked on the buffet that usually held report cards and old balls of yarn. It was a mess of a drawer in a mess of a house, because my parents worked three jobs between them. We were kids then and I thought the world owed me more than canned green beans and the TV in the background.

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We’d be done in half an hour. I’d sleep the rest of the day. One Thanksgiving I saw a cherry glow and fade with the metronome of my sister’s breath. She used to sneak out and smoke by the porch swing. It gets dark early in November.

It was the only thing I saw for miles.

And this year, as I have for the last three years, I will be spending 3,000 miles away from my family. Three thousand mile markers that pass in green and white blurs down the turnpike exits between pastoral town names like Donegal and Somerset. So much separates me from the person I used to be. A teen that rolled his eyes when his mother would cry at the dinner table. I never offered a hand to hold. She’d work ten hours on the turkey and I would say I wasn’t hungry. She’d work ten hours at her job and then I would say she was never around. She’d sleep for five hours and be up in the morning to drink her coffee and say goodbye before going back to the warehouse to work. And I never once offered to clear the dishes, to organize the buffet, to tell her I love her or lend her a hand. I’m three thousand miles from that person now. I’ll be celebrating in a desert this week who I have become; but the person I was in my past lives still glows like an old ember in my mind. It’ll be the only thing I see for miles before bed.

But I am thankful I know who I am now. I am thankful I can see how much she loved me. I am thankful the last time I was home for Thanksgiving that my mom and I shared the last of the sweet potato casserole from a Tupperware dish and ate it cold with forks while watching It’s a Wonderful Life. I am thankful I have those memories now, to hold onto when it feels so cold in the desert these days.

Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls

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This is the first of two Thanksgiving recipes that I worked on this week. I wanted to share this one with you first, as it can take some time. I have broken the recipe up into two parts: the roasted sweet potatoes (which can be made into their own dish if you'd like), and then the rolls. These are, perhaps,the softest rolls I have ever made and can be made smaller than the picture. A true Indiana boy at heart, I made them in cast iron with a lot of butter and brown sugar. Makes 12 giant rolls or 18 medium-sized rolls. 

Ingredients for the Roasted Sweet Potatoes:

• 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
• 3 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions for the Roasted Sweet Potatoes:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prepare a half sheet pan with aluminum foil
2. Place sweet potatoes in a medium bowl
3. In a small measuring cup, whisk coconut oil, syrup, sugar, olive oil, pepper, and salt
4. Pour mixture over sweet potatoes and stir with a wooden spoon to coat
5. Pour onto prepared pan and spread out
6. Roast for 50 minutes or until browned, tender, and a little caramelized
7. (Can eat here as its own side dish or proceed on)
8. Let cool and puree in a food processor

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Ingredients for Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls:

• 2 cups water, warm to the touch
• 5 teaspoons yeast
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar + 2 TB brown sugar, packed
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt (pref smoked salt here)
• 1 cup sweet potato puree (above)
• 1 egg
• 4 tablespoon butter, 2 TB softened
• 4 1/2-6 cup AP flour + more for kneading and topping

Directions for Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls:

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, add water, 1/2 cup brown sugar, salt, and yeast. Let sit for five minutes until foamy
2. Add egg, puree, and 2 tablespoons of softened butter. Turn mixer on low to mix all ingredients together
3. Keeping the mixer on, begin adding flour, one cup at a time. Keep adding flour until dough begins to stick away from sides of bowl (if you add too much flour and dough becomes "sandy", add a small amount of water or milk to reconstitute)
4. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for 3-5 minutes until springy
5. Place in a well-oiled bowl, turning once. Cover with a towel and let sit for an hour in a warm, dry place until doubled in size. 
6. Turn back out onto floured surface and punch down slightly. Cut into 12 or 18 equal pieces and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (or in cast iron skillets that are heavily buttered)
7. Cover with a towel and allow to rise for 20 minutes
8. While rising, preheat oven to 350*F
9. When done rising, place pan or skillet in oven and sprinkle with remaining brown sugar and break remaining 2 TB butter off and sprinkle over dough
10. Bake for 25-32 minutes or until golden brown on top.
11. Enjoy. Best first day, but can be stored in a container for up to three days.

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