TASK DEFINITION: Given the background description of some cooking related query, summarize the question into a title
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: A picture is worth a thousand words...I dropped a glass jar filled with rice. I've picked up the macro-sized pieces of glass, but am wondering if there is any way on earth to make the rice safe to eat, given that I am sure it contains small fragments and shards of glass. I could, naturally, go through it grain-by-grain, but this is only a couple of bucks worth of rice, and I don't think it warrants the time.Does anyone have any suggestions? (Or is this too localized?) I would also welcome suggestions for a better tag than "rice."

SOLUTION: Remediation Methods for Rice Contaminated with Broken Glass

PROBLEM: Imagine you're making someone a tea, but for whatever reason they have to leave soon. How can I cool the tea so that they don't have to choose between leaving it unfinished or burning their mouth? Ideally the method should not only be fast, but also let me reliably reach about the same temperature every time.I've thought of the following:Add additional milk - cools tea, but affects taste.Heat the water less - won't make tea as hot, but might affect how well the tea infuses.Add cool water to boiled water - would cool down a fully-infused tea, but hard to control resulting temperature.Put it in the fridge for 30 seconds or so - would cool tea, but seems like a bad idea.

SOLUTION:
How can I cool tea quickly?