Does it have to be pretty to taste good?

On a recent trip to the flea market, I picked up what I thought were the local sweet potatoes. But I discovered when I sliced through the skin after baking them for an hour that I actually bought the purple-fleshed taro root. I had bought some before and tried to prepare it like a baked potato, but it was incredibly dry.  Disappointed, I stuck the baked taro in the refrigerator for a few days, until I finally tired of moving them out of the way.  Rather than just trash them, I found some recipes in old cookbooks my mother-in-law sent me.  I combined a couple recipes to make taro muffins. Fortunately, we have a stack of coconuts piled up on the side of the house, so I sent my 12 year old out to husk and grate one.  He was happy to oblige - who wouldn't want to set aside school work to impale coconuts on a husking spike and then whack them with a machete?

The resulting muffins were ugly and misshapen but tasted delicious with a texture like cake combined with a sweet chewy crumb.  I’ll probably never be able to duplicate the recipe, but it was something like this:

4 baked and mashed taro roots

Milk (about 1.5 cups?) and grated flesh (1 cup?) of a coconut

3 c. flour (I used part wheat flour)

2T baking powder

1 tsp salt

½ c sugar

6 T melted butter

2 eggs

Some nutmeg and cinnamon to taste

Mash taro with dry ingredients, add wet ingredients, blend and bake at 375 for about 20 minutes.  Then enjoy eating 75% of them before anyone else in the family catches on that they actually taste good.