Sweet Potato-Coconut Milk-Palm Sugar Sorbet

I'm really lazy. Can you tell? I can't even come up with a good title for this dessert. It's fitting, I suppose, since this dessert was borne of laziness in the first place. I'm a huge fan of Ellie's blog AlmostBourdain. I just love the recipes she features on her site, especially those inspired by Malaysia. She wrote about making cendol, a Southeast Asian dessert of mung bean flour noodles, palm sugar syrup, and coconut milk all topped off with a good portion of shaved ice. She changed up the original by making the palm sugar syrup into a granita to take the place of the shaved ice. Great idea! But I am too lazy to make mung bean noodles, so what can substitute? At first I thought bananas--and this would still be a great substitution and if sauteed a bit...--but the Okinawan sweet potatoes at the Korean market caught my eye. Why not? So I boiled the sweet potatoes until tender, peeled off the skin, and used it as the base for my dessert. Next up, pour a bit of coconut milk to moisten the starchy potatoes and top off with a palm sugar sorbet. You can make a granita like Ellie to get closer to the original shaved ice texture, but again laziness took over and I figured dumping the same proportioned mixture into an ice cream maker would be less hassle. It was a big hit with the family and very easy to make. Yum!