My Sweet Potato Tale

There was one time not some distance back, that I was longing for the autumn to come.

Roughly five months ago, the international students in my college went to a nearby farm to plant sweet potatoes. We were told that we would get to harvest them in the autumn. A few days after I returned from my summer holiday, one of the staff in Chikyu Lab, Mr Haga Ryosuke handed me a huge brown paper bag, which was full of the sweet potatoes we planted several months earlier. It was only that time that I remembered that we had planted the sweet potatoes in early May. That was a few weeks back, and these are the last batch of the remaining sweet potatoes.

Purple skin outside, yellow flesh inside.

Having such a huge amount of sweet potatoes, I tried to make as much stuff from it. The most simple method is to just boil it in water and eat the soft potatoes with sugar and salt. It would be much better to have it together with machined coconut meat, but too bad I couldn't get them here in Japan.

Another common way would be sweet potato fritters or tempura in Japanese. I just prepared the batter from wheat flour, some corn flour and a pinch of salt, coat the sweet potatoes with the batter and deep-fry it. The only caution here is not to use too much of corn flour, otherwise the batter will become too crispy and the feeling when having a bite on the tempura would not be that nice.

Boiled sweet potatoes with sugar and salt.

Tempura.

Besides the two common one, I thought about doing some type of traditional cake (kuih) which is similar to cucur kodok. My junior read my mind so well that on the same day, he made some keria and offered us some to try. It was really nice, because he coated the keria with gula Melaka. So, on the next day, I thought of making the same thing too. However, I tried to be too smart, and just went ahead making the keria without checking out the recipe properly.

Well, I actually had a quick look from the online recipe sites, but I did not bother much about the measurements of the ingredients. That is where I went wrong. In the end, I came out with something that looks quite horrible. Damn sad can.

Mission failed.

Michelle said to me that it is not often for me to fail in my cooking. I am not trying to boast myself here, but that is a fact. However, there are those rare times in which my cooking don't turn out like what it is supposed to. The reason why my keria became so soft is because I didn't use enough flour. Initially, I tried to use as little flour as possible, in order to get the maximum taste of the sweet potatoes. To redeem myself, the following day, I added more flour into the remaining mixture which I have not fry them yet.

Finally, I got what I wanted.

Mission accomplished =)

It was just soft and fluffy like dunlop pillow.