Sweet potato and blue cheese, brought to you by an idiot

An idiot gave me this recipe.

No, seriously, I used to work with this guy that was, essentially, "that guy" times 100. He was a PowerPoint presentation builder who not only stretched out and took a nap behind a desk in the video studio during work hours, but he often fell asleep and SNORED while sitting up at his desk.

He said he should have been credited with doing the first successful angioplasty because he performed open heart surgery on his hamster when he was seven years old. He went on and on about how "spacefoam" would take over all of our lives (still not really sure what that is), and let his small children roam about his house without diapers. He must have let his pet bird do the same, because once he came into the office with bird doo on his shoulder, unbeknownst to him.

Once, he was off on a tangent about how people from the South are all uneducated (ahem), and I was really starting to get mad. To make me feel better, he said, "Jaime, I know the South. I used to live in a log cabin (in upstate New York, mind you). I used to have to use an outhouse."

What? Okay, maybe I can let the "uneducated Southerners" comment slide, but insisting we don't have running water?! Come on.

I had almost written him off completely until he brought this sweet potato and blue cheese casserole in for our work potluck. Warm, soft sweet potato, sharp blue cheese and buttery sage with cream! I got seconds and thirds and even took some home. I put a smile on my face and asked for the recipe (by email, of course), and thankfully, the recipe didn't come with a story about how he invented sweet potatoes.

And y'all, I have tried and tried to make this recipe low-fat, but nothing holds up to high heat like heavy cream. Sometimes I've gotten evaporated milk to work, but... I advise you to just go ahead and use the heavy cream. It's worth it.

Also, a note about the blue cheese in this recipe: It pays to get really good blue cheese, like Stilton, Gorgonzola or Danish blue, the kind you have to crumble yourself, from the specialty cheese section of your market. However, if you're trying to cut some of the fat, Publix brand's reduced-fat Gorgonzola has more flavor than others.

Sweet Potato and Blue Cheese Casserole

Ingredients:
- 3 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut lengthwise in 1/8" slices
- 8 ounces blue cheese
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup fresh sage leaves
- 1 pint heavy cream
- Butter
- Salt
- White pepper (If you don't have it, black pepper will work fine.)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 9x13 pan.

In a saucepan over medium heat, melt several tablespoons of butter and add the sage leaves. Saute' until the sage leaves wilt slightly and absorb all of the butter. Set aside.

Lay a row of sweet potato slices like shingles in the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle with salt and white pepper, then disperse half of the sage leaves over the top. Sprinkle 1/3 of the blue cheese over that. Repeat the layers, ending with blue cheese on the top and no sage. Pour the heavy cream over all. It should come up to about 1 inch below the top of the dish. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until all of the cream is absorbed.