Weekend cooking: yams & apple casserole, roasted broccoli, mashed potatoes

I am making yam and apple casserole, baked potatoes, roasted broccoli. To warm up the house, and my belly.

Someone gave me the yams, and apples, and also red potatoes.

Using yams is always kind of a struggle. They are a hard vegetable to deal with, literally. They take a long time to cook, they're hard to peel, and so on.

When I receive gifts of food from thoughtful friends, I use them. So when I received apples and yams so of course I googled "apples and yams." Recipes abounded. I am making two casseroles, one for my friend who gave me the ingredients.

The apples had to be cored, peeled and sliced, and the yams boiled, cooled, peeled and then sliced. Yikes, a lot of work. You layer the sliced apples and sliced yams. In a small saucepan mix cornstarch, apple juice, butter, brown sugar and lemon juice. Pour over the apple-yam layers. Bake, like, forever, and baste constantly.

There is only 5 minutes left on the timer and there is a lot of juice left. So much I wonder if I doubled the cornstarch. We will see in the end. I'll take the casseroles out and let them rest, and see how much juice remains.

While the oven was on I roasted broccoli too.

As for the red potatoes...they had been accidentally frozen. My friend gave them to me saying, "See if you can do anything with these. I'm going to throw them out." I love a challenge.

Unfortunately, this was not challenging. LOL. All I did was google "I accidentally froze red potatoes."

The first search result was from a frugal site, which was responding to a question, "what can I do with accidentally frozen potatoes?" I love the internet.

The red potatoes had been frozen whole, in a Ziploc. I squeezed them hard. The starch separates, and a lot of water came out. The skins slipped off easily, too. The meat turned a bit gray, but oh well.

I crumbled the meat into a baking dish and popped them in the oven with the other stuff I was baking. This would continue drying them. I did not add any spices, salt, butter or milk. Just a pile o' potatoes, baking uncovered.

When the edges were getting a bit brown and crusty I took it out and let it cool. I decided to make mashed potatoes out of them. Add milk, salt and butter. I think they came out OK. I like potatoes any way they're served. I am giving half to the friend who gave me the potatoes and she will let me know if they are palatable.

It's a gorgeous day. I am going to add oil to the car, and clean the interior. I'll zip over to the friend's house and deliver the food. Then I plan to vacuum my apartment and then take a nap. I want to read this evening, with tea. It's the weekend and life is good.

PS:
Nope, the casseroles are still too juicy. Maybe I did forget to double the cornstarch. Or the recipe makes it this way. I'll never make this again, it's taken hours. My personal favorite-to-try recipe I found this morning is a spicy African yam-peanut soup. I'll do that next time, if I ever get yams again.