Recipe collection vol.6 / Sweet potato tarts

 My recipe of sweet potato tarts is so easy that everyone can make them successfully!

Ingredients for 12 tarts or 4 adults:

1 sweet potato - 400 gr

2 sugar - 60 gr

3 fresh cream - 10 cc

4 milk - 10 cc

5 salt-free butter - 30 gr

5 vanilla essence - a few drops

6 a small spoonful of rum

7 a yellow of an egg

Recipe:

1 Slice sweet potatoes to 1cm thick.

2 Boil the sliced potatoes till they become so soft that you can skewer them easily. 

3 Mash the potatoes thoroughly

4 Add salt-free butter, fresh cream, milk and sugar and mix them up thoroughly. After cooling down, you can add the yellow of an egg, vanilla essence and rum into potato and mix them up again.

5 Fill the mixture into molds with a pastry bag

7 Bake them in a toaster oven for about 7 minutes and serve them with tea!

Harvesting sweet potatoes with my daughter

 After autumn rainy days, it was so fine today without any crowds in Osaka and was the best time to harvest my sweet potatoes, which planted about 4 months ago. My daughter was more cooperative in helping me harvest them than usual since she loves sweet potatoes and was looking forward to harvesting and tasting them for long time! Look at her digging out the potatoes with a shovel. She looks like a treasure hunter, doesn't she? 

When she found "one of her treasures", she screamed "Yeaaaaah!!!, got it!!"

 Eventually, we dug about 30 sweat potatoes and most of them were about 20 cm long or longer. This was the first time for me to grow sweet potatoes and I believe it was successful.

 Actually, I planted 3 types of sweet potatoes, Beniazuma, Annou and Naruto-Kintoki. Can you distinguish them? Beniazuma has a little red peel so it's easy to see them but other ones look almost same. 

 After harvesting them, I dried them in shade to sweeten them. The process can vaporize water in the potatoes and we can enjoy sweeter potatoes in a few days.

Autumn seeding

 As the temperature in Osaka goes down, many gardeners around me start sowing and planting autumn and winter vegetables. I was thinking when I should start autumn seeding this year while I was too busy even to write my blog. But I realized it is in the mid of October and I had to be hurry in seeding the vegetables. Today I and my daughter went to my gardening plot and sowed seeds of daikon radishes and planted 4 Chinese cabbages and 1 cabbage.

 My daughter, who is my reliable helper, seems to be well-experienced enough to create a seeding grid in order to sow the seeds in right places without my help.

My daughter's artwork

I usually sow 3 daikon seeds in a hole and will thin out to leave only the most prospective one.

I'm looking forward to harvesting them in this December. 

Along with the daikon radishes, I planted 4 Chinese cabbages and 1 cabbage on my last planting ridge. My garden is now full of kinds of autumn-winter vegetables such as Chinese cabbages, cabbages, daikon radishes, pak-chois and gingers.