Happy Thanksgiving Week, still!
Recipes in this Post
I’m making the rash assumption you read the first and second posts in this series. If not, scoot back to the prior sentence and click on the links. You’ll learn all about turkey, my inability to differentiate between stuffing and dressing, and why mash potatoes matter to world peace. OK, maybe not the world peace part, but at least I didn’t say “whirled peas”. That would have been a really bad joke. Really, really bad. Good thing I didn’t use it!
One of the more controversial foods to hit the Thanksgiving table at the Hectic household are sweet potatoes. I was initially going to right this post to educate you on the fact that we actually eat yams in the US, but call them sweet potatoes because we don’t know what we’re doing. I “knew” that sweet potatoes were yellow-fleshed and yams were orange fleshed. In fact, my first draft of this post was all about the orange-fleshed yams. But I had this ugly nagging feeling. You know, that one you just can’t get rid of until you do something about it. So I searched and found The United States Sweet Potato Council’s website at http://www.sweetpotatousa.org/. Those folks set me straight, the orange sweet potatoes that we eat are just that…sweet potatoes. Yams don’t look anything like them, are much larger, and aren’t even distantly related. If you need to know more, this is a great resource.
So then for the next big shocker for me. You can eat the skins of sweet potatoes! I had always been told the skin was toxic. In fact, I’ve told my kids this so many times that they are never going to believe that I’m backtracking. Of course, most of them won’t eat baked sweet potatoes, so they’ll just ignore me anyway. So what else is new?
Now I’m wondering if you can just mash the darned things with the skin on? I’m gonna have to try that. I’ll have to get back to you (unless it turns out that the skins are toxic and all the expert nutritionists on the internet are wrong…then I won’t be back to tell you).
Where all the controversy arises with Thanksgiving sweet potatoes are in the actual method of preparation. I’m really, really old school. Puncture the skin with a fork. Lay out a piece of foil large enough to wrap around the sweet potato twice. Put some appropriate spices onto the foil, then put down two small pats of butter (as to slabs of butter). Wrap the potato and bake at 350F for at least 40 minutes. I usually bake mine an hour or more. Oftentimes because I can’t figure out what that timer was timing. When they’re done, I unwrap them, cut them in half longwise, and put them on the serving plate.
As to appropriate spices, I like to use any combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin pie spice, and ginger. Don’t overdo the spices, a little goes a long way when baking the potato. You’re just shooting to infuse a little bit of flavor, you can always add more when you actually eat it.
To speed up the cooking process, you can run a metal skewer through the sweet potato from one end to the other. You can run the skewer through the middle, on the short side, but it won’t help the cooking process all that much. You can try to use a wooden skewer, but (1) they’re almost impossible to get through an uncooked sweet potato, (2) they don’t conduct heat, so they won’t make the sweet potato cook faster, and (3) it’s really hard to explain why your sweet potato has splinters. Use a metal skewer and don’t listen to me joking about wooden skewers.
That’s the old school preparation, and the one I like the most. I prefer the baked method because I believe that baking keeps more of the nutrients available for you, rather than boiling. But, I’ve also boiled my sweet potatoes and then mashed them. In the past, I’ve always, always, always peeled them. It’s a pain in the backside, since sweet potatoes are somewhat irregular, and can have woody spots. When you hit a woody spot with a peeler, especially a small, inexpensive one, you can end up peeling your finger instead of the sweet potato. Well, at least I’ve heard that can happen, and the photographs of me with the multiple band-aids on my fingers are certainly not proof of any kitchen accidents that have happened to me trying to peel sweet potatoes.
[cryout-pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”33%”]Honestly, I’m kind of pumped that I might not have to peel the sweet potatoes. If I can also clean them in the dishwasher I’m gonna be jumping for joy.[/cryout-pullquote]
Anyway, if you’re going to boil your sweet potatoes, cut them so they cook faster. I usually cut mine into quarters or smaller. The larger the sweet potato, the more pieces I cut it into. Add the sweet potatoes to already boiling water and boil them for 30 minutes.
Once done, drain and mash just like you would with white potatoes. Then add a little bit of butter and any combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin pie spice, and ginger. The amount of spices are pretty much to taste. When you serve mashed sweet potatoes, you can serve them as you just prepared them…just mashed sweet potatoes.
As a diabetic, that’s as far afield as I go for sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving, but there is a large segment of my extended family that believes that sweet potatoes aren’t edible unless they have marshmallows on top. While I don’t eat them this way, I’ve prepared them. I simply make mashed sweet potatoes, then I put them in a 8×8 or 9×13 pan and cover the entire top with marshmallows. I think that miniature marshmallows work best, but I’ve seen this done with full-sized marshmallows. I’m sure somebody out there has tried the square s’mores specific marshmallows. That just seems weird to me. Anyway, you then put the casserole in a 350F oven for 30 minutes.
I’ve also tried a sweet potato casserole with a pecan topping. I’m still working on a diabetic friendly version of this casserole. The problem is that the standard topping contains quite a bit of brown sugar. Every substitution that I’ve tried hasn’t had the crunch and flavor that I’d like.
So as you can tell, there are a variety of ways that you might find sweet potatoes at the Hectic Family’s Thanksgiving. Since sweet potatoes are one of my favorite vegetables, don’t be surprised if you see more than one variation!