I always hated candied yams when I was growing up. Every year I’d try them at my Grandma’s house, because they should be good! Sweet potatoes! Marshmallows! Toastiness! But every year they turned out to taste funny and artificial.

THESE are DIFFERENT.

Brown sugar! Cinnamon! Butter! Toasted pecans! And little marshmallows melting into it all!

I brought a pan of these to my office potluck yesterday. The entire table went nuts about them; four separate people asked me for the recipe; and someone stopped in the parking lot after work to yell all the way across it, “What were those called? They were good!”

The secret is that they’re not just marshmallows under a broiler. Instead, they emphasize the praline-like flavors of brown sugar and nuts.

So I thought I’d share the recipe with all of you.

3 pounds of organic sweet potatoes
1 1/2 sticks of butter
1 cup of brown sugar
3/4 cup of any gluten-free flour (I used a generic mix, and yes you could use regular flour too)
1 cup of mini marshmallows
2 tablespoons of cinnamon, or more to taste
1 cup of pecan pieces
A sprinkle of salt
Olive oil for coating

Preheat the oven to 400. Cut the potatoes into quarters, first lengthwise then widthwise (or vice versa). Toss them with olive oil, being careful to coat them thoroughly on all sides so that they don’t dry out. Salt them a little, as you would if you were going to serve them by themselves. Bake for 45-60 minutes, or until soft and tender. (I use a big brownie pan for this; they fit pretty well. They cook more evenly if you spread them out in one layer, as much as possible.)

Meanwhile, mix all of the other ingredients together except the marshmallows. I like to mix them with my bare hands; it feels good and it’s easier on the arms than cutting the butter and sugar together with a fork. (In a pinch, by the way, you can do what I did and throw in white sugar with molasses. I used half that and half brown sugar because I didn’t have enough brown sugar and my wife Annie knew what to do – and it turned out great.) Mix until smooth, then add the marshmallows and mix until they are thoroughly coated.

When the potatoes are done, let them cool enough to handle. You can either stuff each one with the marshmallow mix, or just make sure all the potato quarters are orange-side-up (not skin-side-up) and spread it lavishly all across them. Bake for 20 more minutes, until the topping is all melty and good.

My mini-cookbook is free this week, and I’ll match any one-time donation you make to end slavery; just email the receipt to peacemeals at gmail dot com.

You see, a friend of mine posted something on Facebook pointing out that all that candy Hershey’s makes uses cacao beans grown by slave labor. I did a little research and found that the same is true of Mars and Nestlé. Which is especially bad at Halloween, when we’re all in a candy-buying frenzy. Handing candy to children that was made of ingredients grown by enslaved children. It’s like a nightmare version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It’s often hard to tell that a “fun size” bar or little treat is made by one of the Big Three companies, until you flip it over and read the fine print that says that Reese’s is made by Hershey’s, or 3 Musketeers is made by Mars Inc., or Baby Ruth by Nestlé. Inside the cookbook, we look at what is going on the world and how we can stop it.

(On the “hilarious but well-meaning” front: while I was researching everything in the cookbook, I found a student organization at Harvard – at least I hope it’s a student organization – that wrote an enormous headline for their blog: “SIGN OUR PETITION FOR SLAVERY AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN SLAVERY @ HARVARD COLLEGE IN 2010-2011!” I’d rather sign one against it….)

I’ll even give you a sneak peek into the cookbook right here. It includes hot dogs decorated like mummies, a fantastic gluten-free croissant recipe that you can use for tons of things, pumpkin cupcakes/muffins, and “worm” sandwiches. Oh, and cheese fingers. Made of cheese. Plus, how to decorate cupcakes:

Pumpkin Cupcake by Kristin A. of Meringue Bake Shop

I finally learned how you make those neat bakery-style swirlies of frosting atop cupcakes. Nevermore shall you have to spread it on with a knife as if you got it from the third-grade bake sale! Everyone will think it was professionally baked, especially if you go the extra yard and stick one of those mellocreme pumpkins on top like in the picture. Hey, now they’ll be half-off, right?

You start out with a pastry bag and frosting tip. You want the kind called an “open star”, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a biggish star shape. I don’t like a plain circle, although that IS called a cupcake tip. If you get the tips, you can, in a pinch, fill a plastic bag with frosting, cut the corner off, and stick the tip on (maybe tape it on), or try the same with a waxed paper cone – but it’s a fiddly and messy business if you’re not used to it, and if you ARE used to it it’s probably high time to invest in an actual decorating set.

Decorating Tips by seelensturm

( I talk all fancy about it, but the only reason I finally have one is that it came with my Twinkie baking set. There, I said it. Super-useful, you guys – the frosting thing even more than the set.)

Here’s how: you draw a circle with the frosting on the top of the cupcake, and when you close the circle you continue spiraling inward and upward for another loop or so. The bigger the tip, the easier this is, within reason. I mean, you don’t want to take that theory to its extreme and get a tip the size of the cupcake. Although that might work well in a whole different way.

If you want to take it up another level, you can do this:

Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes by seelensturm

That combines three nifty techniques which are all really easy. Two of them in fact are ridiculously easy: sticking a strawberry on top (did you see how professional that candy pumpkin looked?) and baking the cupcake in an ice cream cone. Of course, this will make fewer cupcakes than normal, because the cones take more batter.

Just set the cones in a muffin tin (you could do a baking tray too, but the muffin tin gives you a little more safety; see if your cones fit well in a mini muffin tin) and pour the batter into them instead of into the tins. Plus, it makes the cleanup really simple! Swirl frosting on top and you’re done. For tons of extra points, swirl a little melted chocolate, not too hot, around the inside of the cone and let cool before adding the batter.

You can use a french tip instead of an open star tip; the french tip just has more points on the star, so the frosting comes out with lots of little lines in it as if it has been applied with a comb. See the picture of decorating tips for more ideas!

It’s hard to read about this stuff right after hearing a little about how slavery still exists, isn’t it? It seems jarring to go from that to cupcakes. Download the cookbook and find out how to take action.

Found Chinook Salmon by Portland Mike via Flickr. Are meals put together with food stamp money 'found art' too?

So evidently Salon.com ran an article about “Hipsters on Food Stamps“, subtitled “They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies. Got a problem with that?”

Now, the whole reason I have this blog is that I write weekly mini-cookbooks that help people save money on groceries and have fun with their food.

When my wife got food stamps, we used them to supplement our food budget. She got $200, which was $60 more than I budgeted for myself when I was single, but still a totally reasonable amount – if you are planning your meals out carefully. We did, and we were able to keep buying organic, healthy ingredients and making exciting meals out of them. And while we have access to a lot of good food in the Bay Area, the cost of living is not exactly cheap.

It seems that meal planning is not exactly a well-known concept. The article’s tone was simply curious, despite the defensive subtitle, but responses fell into three basic categories: “Buying healthy food is good,” “Buying expensive stuff on food stamps is unwise,” and “[They should] die and clear the field for the rest of us.”

(Yes, that one was a direct quote.)

The usual negative response is less homicidal and more inclined to say that if you can afford to buy organic food with the same allotment that others use for bread or Mountain Dew, you don’t deserve food stamps. As a meal planner, a former recipient, and a firm advocate for both organic food and just plain loving what you eat, let me rant for a minute about why this is wrong.

By day, I work for the employment development dept – the folks who brought you unemployment insurance – and I can tell you for sure that if the government wanted to put in some rules about what you had to buy to deserve food stamps, they would.

Come to think of it, they do: food stamps are already set up so you can only buy food products and food plants with them. If you throw soap or diapers or chamomile plants in your cart too, the cashier gives them back and tells you you have to pay for them separately. Because the computer says so when you pay for them with the EBT card.

It would be no problem at all for them to make the card reject organic free-range salmon, or caviar, or twelve-packs of Mountain Dew. They could say, “Food stamps are strictly for basic pantry staples,” or “produce and protein,” or “farmer’s markets,” or “prepackaged crap that we get lobbyist kickbacks for encouraging you to buy,” or just about anything – but they don’t.

Why? Because like unemployment, that money is there for people in a certain financial situation. Where I am, those rules are mainly that you can only be making 135% of poverty or below, which is extremely low: 135% is around $14k a year for one person.

They don’t require that you be good at handling money, or using it as frugally as you would if it were cash. It’s more for a lot of people than they would spend on food if they had cash. That’s a good thing. Shame and frugality and fear tell us that if we’re poor we should live on beans and rice; it is GOOD that at some point the government steps in and says, “Look, at least have the OPPORTUNITY to have your nutritional needs met so you have the vitamins and fuel you need to function.” (As an amateur nutritionist, I will tell you straight out, beans and rice do not a balanced diet make no matter how many times you read Diet for A Small Planet.)

Salmon Nigiri by Adactio via Flickr

And yeah, for a lot of people, if they were able to handle money or work or the search for either one better, they would not be on unemployment or food stamps. This is not blame or shame. It is GOOD that people who were never taught that stuff growing up have a chance to learn it when they hit bottom instead of being tossed out as hopeless.

I have seen many, many people come in to our career center who send out all-lowercase resumes full of misspellings to jobs they don’t qualify for, or tell me flat-out that they’re not looking for work, or REEK of pot or booze. I’ve known many people on food stamps who had no idea how to handle money, whether that meant they were using their food stamps for food they didn’t need, or that wasn’t enough for them, or that they didn’t read the paperwork and do what they needed to do to stay on food stamps (unemployment too, all day long).

If buying organic food is a bad financial decision of the kind that can eventually land you on food stamps – which I don’t think it is – then it’s a good thing that people have a structured, limited amount of grocery money to learn that from in a very tight financial situation.

If it’s not, then criticism of it seems to me to come from the exact same puritannical, self-denying, fear-based shame-ridden crap that, I also know from much experience, is what lands people in these positions to begin with.