Sweet Potato and Sausage Gratin

This tasted great, actually. I will never make it again. It was the ugliest critter I've seen on my table in a long long time. I had to mess around with the recipe a little bit, but I don't think any of my substitutions can be blamed. I replaced the Italian sausage with a half-pound of TJ's southwestern-esque turkey burger, which has been sitting in my freezer for way too long. I didn't seem to have any actual white wine, so I dropped in some rice cooking wine, and lacking apricot nectar, apricot preserves, or dried apricots, I hacked off a few chunks of tamarind paste and threw them in. The flavor remained very nice and savory.

But the end result was a miserable, non-sticking-together, blackened, pitiful pile of leek shreds and tater pieces and turkey chunks that came out of the pan in a graceless sort of heap. The blackness was from the potatoes oxidizing, rather than burning. I don't know why they darkened so fast, but I could hardly throw them in the pan fast enough. At any rate they came out of the oven pretty dark brown. As the royal taster said, "I wouldn't try feeding this to a two-year-old." I don't know which two-year-old he has in mind, but it sounds like good advice.