Linguica, Sweet Potato, and Spinach Chowder
My CSA box this week contained sweet potatoes…lots of sweet potatoes. The ugliest sweet potatoes you’ve ever seen.
This is what a sweet potato looks like when it’s been damaged by voles. Pretty ugly, eh? But other than the obvious cosmetic damage, there’s no harm to the sweet potato — you can trim off the damaged parts and use it as usual. Vole-damaged sweet potatoes even store just as well as perfect specimens. But of course a lot of people would be put off by the visual and pass these up in favor of more perfect-appearing sweets. So when you’re hitting the farmers’ markets at the end of the season, if you see some ugly sweet potatoes cheap, snap ‘em up! They’re a bargain, and you’re rewarding a farmer for using organic methods.
I also had some excellent-looking young spinach in this week’s CSA box, and a few onions. I’d picked up some wonderful linguica from a local sausagemaker a few weeks earlier, and I always keep chicken stock in my freezer. It’s a blustery day here in Southwest Ohio, with the first sleet of the season. Soup seemed like the perfect choice. So I made one of my favorite rustic autumn soups: Linguica, Sweet Potato, and Spinach Chowder.
