Hey, welcome back! Pull up a chair and mix a COVID-19 cocktail because I am so excited to talk to you about a food that doesn’t get the credit it deserves — the sweet potato.
This week I will give you some ideas on ways to use sweet potatoes that I hope will encourage you to cook outside the box.
For most people when they think of sweet potatoes, they think of the beautiful orange potatoes drowning in butter and brown sugar and sometimes topped with toasted marshmallows, but not this girl. In our house we like our sweet potatoes mashed with butter, garlic and sometimes some heavy cream or diced and roasted with veggies and kielbasa.
I will share a few of my recipes with you and I hope they will inspire you to make them your own.
So, let’s start with basic mashed sweet potatoes. You can treat sweet potatoes the same way you treat a white or yellow potato — peel it, boil it, drain it and mash it. I often add fresh garlic, butter, milk or heavy cream, and salt pepper to taste. If you are feeling froggy, I have added whiskey to sweet potatoes once when I was in a local cooking competition. I used an emulsion blender to make the sweet potatoes really smooth and creamy and called them “whiskey whipped sweet potatoes.”
Next, let’s think about roasting sweet potatoes! This dish is super easy and great for a weeknight dinner — we had this one night this week and it remains a family favorite.
For this you will need:
• 4-6 sweet potatoes
• 4-6 cubanelle peppers (Wal-Mart carries them)
• 1 large onion
• 1-2 packages of kielbasa or smoked sausage
• 2-3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• Garlic powder
• Onion powder
• Ground Thyme
• Salt and pepper
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Cut up the potatoes, peppers, onion and kielbasa into bite-sized pieces. Pour the olive oil over the mixture and sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, salt and pepper. Toss the mixture to get everything coated really well then spread out on a cookie sheet or two – I line mine with foil so I don’t have a bunch of clean up afterward. Bake for 35-45 minutes. I serve this with a fresh aioli that I whip up using about ¼ – ½ cup mayo, 1-2 cloves of freshly minced garlic, the juice of 1-2 limes and a few sprinkles of smoked paprika. Mix it up and either dip your roasted sweet potatoes mix in it or put a dollop on top and mix it around.
The last sweet potato recipe I want to share with you is one of my favorites – shepherd’s pie with mashed sweet potatoes. Make mashed sweet potatoes like I mentioned earlier and set aside.
For the rest of the recipe you will need:
• 1 lb ground lamb (you can get this locally)
• 1-2 bags of frozen veggie mix – peas, carrots, corn and green beans
• 1 medium sized onion
• Worcestershire sauce
• 3 tablespoons of flour
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon each Dried thyme and rosemary
• Salt and pepper
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Brown the ground lamb and add in the diced onion about 3 minutes into the browning process. While you are cooking the lamb, steam your veggies in the microwave; I always get the veggies you can steam in the bag to make life easier.
Once the veggies are done throw them in with the lamb and onions along with the fresh minced garlic, dried thyme and rosemary, and get everything mixed up. Add in about one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce and the flour — the flour helps hold everything together. Season with salt and pepper, but not too much salt since we just added the Worcestershire sauce and you have probably already seasoned your sweet potatoes.
Spread the lamb and veggie mixture in the bottom of a 13 x 9 pan then spread those delicious mashed sweet potatoes on top and bake for about 35 – 45 minutes; just long enough to let everything get acquainted in the dish since it was all cooked prior to building the shepherds pie. Voila dinner is done!
You can change any of these recipes to reflect things your family likes — you could do sliced steak or chicken with the roasted sweet potatoes or you could use ground beef, chicken or turkey in the shepherd’s pie if that floats your boat. I hope this has given you a fresh perspective on sweet potatoes and inspired you to incorporate them more into your daily cooking.
Don’t forget I want to hear from you. If you try a recipe I have shared or have questions about something we have talked about feel free to email me at lindsey.wolford@outlook.com; you never know you may have the same question as someone else and it could be something we talk about one week.
I hope these are recipes you and your family enjoy and as always, I am sending love from my kitchen to yours.
Lindsey lives in White Sulphur Springs with her wife Candi and their nephew, Austin. By day Lindsey is a service coordinator at Seneca Health Services in the IDD/Waiver program. Lindsey enjoys spending time with family and friends, entertaining when possible but most importantly she loves cooking from the heart.
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