Sweet Potato Pilaf

Sophomore year begins. Organic Chemistry 2261 is the course. The professor is Dr. Whitfield, a man who walks into the lecture hall with the calm of a person who knows he is about to ruin sixty pre-med students' weeks and finds this neither troubling nor amusing — it is simply the nature of the material. Organic chemistry is hard. Not hard like calculus, which is hard because it is abstract. Hard like a language — it has its own grammar, its own vocabulary, its own internal logic that makes no sense until it makes all the sense, and the transition between no-sense and all-sense is the part that breaks people. I will not break. MawMaw Shirley did not raise a girl who breaks. She raised a girl who stirs for thirty-five minutes. Organic chemistry will take longer than thirty-five minutes. But the principle is the same: patience, attention, and the refusal to rush.

Biology 2160 — Genetics — is the companion course, and here I am at home. The genetics of life, the inheritance of traits, the molecular mechanisms by which parents become children and grandmothers become granddaughters. Every lecture I think about MawMaw Shirley. Every Punnett square is a recipe: inputs determine outputs, and the cook's job — the geneticist's job — is to understand the relationship between what goes in and what comes out.

The apartment kitchen had its first multi-person dinner Friday night. Priya came over — her first time seeing the apartment — and she stood in the kitchen and said, "This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," which is hyperbole but also kind of true, because the kitchen, small as it is, is organized and stocked and smelling like the garlic I had already started sautéing. I made jambalaya. Priya brought wine — box wine, the kind that college students buy because it is six dollars and contains enough servings to forget about organic chemistry temporarily. We ate and drank and talked about everything except school, which is the purpose of Friday night: to be people, not students.

MawMaw Shirley called Saturday morning. She said, "How is the kitchen?" I said, "Perfect." She said, "No kitchen is perfect. A kitchen is always becoming." She is right. The kitchen is becoming. I am becoming. The roux is always becoming. Nothing is finished. Everything is in progress. This is either terrifying or beautiful and today it is beautiful.

That Friday night with Priya cemented something I had been hoping was true: that this kitchen, small as it is, could hold people and feed them and make them feel welcome. The sweet potato pilaf I served alongside the jambalaya is the dish I keep coming back to — golden, fragrant, forgiving — because it rewards the same patience MawMaw Shirley taught me, and it looks, on the plate, like something a person who knows what she’s doing made on purpose. That’s the goal. That’s always the goal.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 30 min | Total Time: 45 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups long-grain white rice
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small yellow onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 3/4 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons toasted pepitas (optional, for serving)

Instructions

Sauté the aromatics. Heat olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute more, until fragrant.
Toast the spices and rice. Add the cumin, smoked paprika, cinnamon, and cayenne to the pan. Stir constantly for 30 seconds until the spices bloom and smell fragrant. Add the dry rice and stir to coat every grain in the spiced oil, toasting for about 2 minutes.
Add sweet potatoes and broth. Stir in the cubed sweet potatoes and pour in the vegetable broth. Add the salt and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring once to distribute the sweet potatoes evenly.
Simmer covered. Once boiling, reduce heat to low, cover tightly, and cook for 18 minutes. Do not lift the lid during this time — the steam does the work.
Rest and fluff. Remove from heat and let stand, still covered, for 5 minutes. Uncover and gently fluff with a fork, folding the sweet potato through the rice without mashing.
Finish and serve. Taste and adjust salt as needed. Fold in the fresh parsley and transfer to a serving dish. Scatter toasted pepitas over the top if using. Serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Sweet Potato Pilaf — The Dinner That Made My First Apartment Feel Like Home