TASK DEFINITION: Given the background description of some cooking related query, summarize the question into a title
PROBLEM: I'm making mushroom soup recipe and I'm looking forward to serving it at dinner tomorrow. I have powdered the shitakes, sliced the mushrooms and the wild rice is in the oven now. In order to serve the best possible soup, where should I stop preparation tonight? If I were comfortable with all of the ingredients, I would prepare the soup up to the addition of cream. Unfortunately, I know nothing of wild rice, and how best to hold it. Will it be OK overnight in the fridge? Even better, can I leave the soup (up to the cream addition) on the porch overnight? It's expected to dip 10 degrees F below freezing and stay there until morning.EDIT: My best guess is to add the rice to the soup now, store overnight on the porch, and add the cornstarch slurry, cream and the rest just prior to service. Would the wild rice hold up to that?

SOLUTION: How to best hold wild rice

PROBLEM: I recently bought something that was labelled at the grocery store as a "purple sweet potato". They were larger than what I am used to for sweet potatoes, but looked similar, although they had a purple skin on the outside and white flesh on the inside. I figured since they were labelled as "sweet potatoes", I would prepare them the same way I like to prepare regular sweet potatoes, by boiling them first (for about 40 minutes), then removing the skin, slicing it into wedges and then pan frying them. I have done this many times with normal sweet potatoes, and it works quite well.However, after I boiled the purple sweet potatoes for 45 minutes, I pulled them out to take the skins off, and they were soft and stringy and incredibly off putting - they felt the same way as a gummy mashed potato would feel, and they fell apart all over the place.Are they more like a potato, requiring less boiling time? Or is there something else going on here that I am missing?Edit: I went to the grocery store today, and they are now labelled as "purple yams". I don't know if that makes a difference or not. I also got a picture of them, to make my description a bit clearer.

SOLUTION: Cooking "purple sweet potatoes" or "purple yams"

PROBLEM: I have a large batch of corn bread that's about to go bad, a situation I'd like to salvage by turning it into corn bread pudding. Unfortunately, all of the recipes I can find online start from base ingredients, or corn muffin mix, rather than using completed corn bread as an ingredient. Recipes for bread pudding don't have this problem; they don't expect you to start from flour :)Can I just substitute corn bread for wheat bread in a bread pudding recipe and get palatable results? I'm not at all sure. If not, what would people suggest I do to my corn bread, to turn it into corn bread pudding?

SOLUTION:
Making corn bread pudding from corn bread