French Fry Fairy

My neighbor Eddie picked me up for a little Miami adventure. I rarely leave the beach these days, and he thought it was time we ventured out for a little change of pace. Our first stop was work related, so let’s go ahead and skip over that. Boring. Next, we stopped at the tropical fish store! Eddie was finally ready for a pet to love and nurture. Oscar the fish, who now lives in a happy little fish bowl with bamboo plants, is my newest neighbor and Eddie’s newest family member. Adorable. Next, we went to Versailles, which is a terrific little Cuban restaurant in Miami.

Eddie has been talking about yucca fries for weeks, so I was finally going to try this woody shrub. Let’s back up a minute. What is yucca? Well, let me explain. Also known as a cassava, yucca is native to South America and is a member of the Euphorbiaceous (spurge) family. What is a spurge? To that I will give the answer – who cares? This isn’t history; it’s a blog about French fries. However, I will let you know that tapioca comes from this plant and everyone has tried tapioca pudding!

The yucca fries were pretty good. Eddie the neighbor describes the small thoroughly cooked fries as the “nectar” of French fries. The small yucca fries were magnificent.
The thicker fries were not quite as good as they were a little stringy and a little undercooked. So, when ordering yucca fries make sure to ask for the small, thinly cut fries because they are a gazillion times better than the big steak-style fries. Overall, the steak-style fries would not receive a very good review, but the small fries were just so unique and amazing that I would recommend that everyone try them.

There was another part of this adventure that is worth mentioning. The yucca fries arrived with a sauce on the side that was green, which threw me off a little, but it was fantastic. We asked our server what was in the sauce, but he had no idea. It was a secret. He did let us know that mayonnaise and cilantro were two of the ingredients. We figured out that garlic had to have been thrown into the recipe somewhere. Eddie said that it was very similar to an aioli sauce that his mother used to make, so he clued me in a little bit on the origins of the dipping sauce and even gave me a quick lesson on how it is made. This seemed so strange to me. This food seems so exotic because I grew up in the Midwest. My mother used to make casseroles, beef stroganoff, or any other typical meat-filled Midwestern dish. I wouldn’t say one type of cooking style is better, but they are very, very different.

French Fry Fairy Advice: Good deeds will always come back to you tenfold.