The sweet potatoes in Beijing are incredibly fragrant, but a bit heavy on the stomach. If you add apples to lighten up the dish, you will be delighted with the result. The Shanghai sweet potatoes are different. Their skin is reddish, and the inside is yellow, not orange. They are good, but not as good as the ones in Beijing. This is a roasted sweet potato cart in Shanghai. The woman who sells the potatoes had it made especially for her.
Peel and cut into bite sized pieces:
2-3 sweet potatoes
2-3 apples, either Yellow Delicious, or Fuji apples work well
Put into a greased casserole dish, and add:
¼ cup apple juice
1 Tbsp. butter
(cinnamon)
Cover and bake at 350F/ 180C for 1 hour.
Uncover and bake for 15 more minutes.
OR microwave at high, stirring every 10 minutes until done. I only do this when I am desperate and have no oven.
Some of the apartments we have lived in here in China don’t have ovens. For years you could not buy one easily. At one apartment when we wanted to cook stollens for Christmas my friends Meg and John invited me over to their house to cook them on Christmas Eve.
In our current apartment there was no oven and we were delighted to find that you can now buy small ovens in the local appliance store here in Shanghai named Su-ning. They are an old fashioned electric box oven with heating rods on top and on the bottom, and it has a fan to move the hot air inside. It does the job. It has a name – very interesting. It is TOMATO brand.