• Overview
• Varieties & Serving Suggestions
• The Difference Between Sweet Potatoes & Yams
• The Difference Between Chiles, Peppers & Pepper
• Shopping Information

When Chicagoans Danny and Marie Lena chose their second careers, their “recipe for success” was homemade, healthy vegetable chips that Danny’s family had served for three generations. Beginning in 2005, the Lenas sold at farmers’ markets and developed an enthusiastic following (one taste will explain why). In 2006 they opened their own storefront, and made their delicious chips available to fans nationwide via their online store.

Made with just the vegetable, olive oil and sea salt, Papa Lena’s Vegetable Chips (named for the grandfather who taught Danny how to make the chips many years ago) are the type of ingredient gourmet snackers and creative chefs long to find. If we had the time and the skill, we’d like to make them ourselves, but because we can buy them from Papa Lena, we can spend our time inviting guests, concocting recipes and figuring out the rest of the meal.

These chips look gorgeous and taste just as good. Three-inch-long fingers cut from juicy red bell peppers, they have an intense roasted red pepper flavor and look exotic and enticing wherever they are placed.

• As hors d’oeuvres, plain or with a dip.
• As vegetable “wafers” with omelets, sandwiches, soup and salads.
• As architectural towers on a dinner plate (we love anchoring them in the center of the dinner plate in mashed potatoes, and arranging the other foods around it.
• The color alone makes this a festive food for all “red” holidays: Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Independence Day.

Some like it hot, and they will love these poblano chips. A smoked poblano is an ancho, and while these are roasted rather than smoked, the flavor is “close enough.”

• Serve with a cool dip, like yogurt-cucumber.
• Crumble them to add excitement to foods from mashed potatoes to pork chops.
• Serve them with beer.
• Crumbling them and sprinkling on a pizza or in pasta, instead of cracked red pepper, is a gourmet experience.
• Ditto for any Mexican food application. We served them with a variation of Mole Poblano sauce as a dip*. Instead of putting the poblano inside the sauce, it was the dipper. We bet it’s an experience no one has ever had before.

*Unsweetened chocolate, almonds, tomatoes, raisins, tomatoes, raisins, cloves and cinnamon.

For all of the times we’ve loved the beet chips served to us at fine restaurants, we’ve thought to pull out our deep-fryer and make them at home. But beets are one of those labor-intensive foods, so we never found the time.

Thank you, Papa Lena, for making these. Aside from the joy of snacking, the beautiful burgundy and yellow color is beautiful plate decor, serving as a crown atop other vegetable purées, as the base for goat cheese hors d’oeuvres, and to add flavor, color and crunch to frisée and endive salads. We could find a new way to use these chips every day of the month...the least of which is in our homemade beet ice cream. (For those ice cream-makers among you: Beet ice cream in of itself is magnificent, a scoop of red beet and a scoop of yellow beet will wow them, and the latter with one of these beet chip crowns will generate applause).

These sweet potato chips look beautiful and have a nice sweet potato taste, but were a tiny bit grainy on the finish. This might have been a batch-specific issue: We liked them enough to try them again. They are much more of a vegetable chip than the North Fork Sweet Potato Chips, that we adore, which are starchier and more of a gourmet potato chip.

• They’re a hit as snacks, with any soft or hard beverage.
• If you love sweet potatoes, are a vegetarian or have vegetarian guests, consider a “trio” or “quartet” course of a baked sweet potato, mashed sweets, candied sweets (try glazing with one of Moosewood Hollow’s infused maple syrups) and these chips.

• Sweet potatoes, indigenous to Central America, are a totally different plant family from yams. Sweet potatoes are smooth, with thin skin, short and blocky, with tapered ends. Their flesh is moist and sweet. Sweet potatoes are a member of the genus that contains morning glories, and when the plant is in flower, the flowers look like morning glories. There are 7 varieties of sweet potato, and the flesh can be white, yellow, orange or purple. The skin can be orange-brown, red, purple or white.
• Yams, indigenous to Africa, have rough, scaly skin and are long and cylindrical—some with a split bottom creating "toes.” Their flesh is dry and starchy.
• The confusion began decades ago when orange-flesh sweet potatoes were introduced to the southern United States. Producers and sellers wanted to distinguish them from the then-prevailing white-flesh variety and called them yams, from the African word nyami, referring to the “real” yam. At that time, the African yam was not known among populations in America. Subsequently, immigrant populations and the import of “real” yams created the confusion.
• To help with the confusion, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that the label “yam” always be accompanied with the words “sweet potato” when referring to a sweet potato.
• The sweet potato is only distantly related to the potato, which is indigenous to Peru.

PAPA LENA’S VEGETABLE CHIPS
Beet Chips, Roasted Red Pepper Chips, Spicy Hot Poblano Chips, Sweet Potato Chips

• Roasted Red Pepper Chips or Poblano Chips 3 Clam Shells $18.00
• Beet Chips or Sweet Potato Chips 3 Clam Shells $15.00

Purchase online at PapaLena.com