Fancy Baked Sweet Potatoes

I was reading through a recent issue of Martha Stewart Living (I told you I love Martha!) and saw these amazing looking sweet potatoes. There wasn't really a recipe, just a one page thing about how fantastic sweet potatoes are. The picture was gorgeous! I decided I must try them, and the opportunity presents itself shortly thereafter when I received a bunch of sweet potatoes from my produce co-op one week. I knew there was no way my kids would eat these, so I slated them for a date night dinner for the husband and me.

Fancy Baked Sweet Potatoes

Per serving:
1 baked sweet potato
1 cup roasted Brussels sprouts
2 Tbsp blue cheese
2 Tbsp dried cranberries
1/4 cup toasted pecans

Split baked potato lengthwise and top with Brussels sprouts, blue cheese, dried cranberries, and pecans. Serve.

*****

Doesn't get a whole lot easier than that. The sweet potatoes I had were pretty little, so I baked two for each of us. All other ingredients are estimated because I'm really not sure how much of each I used. These looked GORGEOUS--the orange potatoes, green Brussels sprouts, crimson cranberries, flecks of white and little bits of blue from the cheese. I was so excited to eat these...then I took a bite and was so disappointed. It was not at all what I expected and honestly I thought it was kind of gross. So did the husband. But we didn't really have anything else we could make for dinner at that point because it was late on a Friday. So we muscled through it, and surprisingly we discovered that the more bites we took, the more we liked it. The trick was to have a little of each component on each bite. We ended up both really liking it and cleaning our plates. I'm so glad it worked out because I was really apprehensive after that first bite and debated running out to get us a pizza. I'm glad we stuck with it and finished them off. It ended up being so tasty!

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

So, the chicken sausage recipe author said she had made mashed sweet potatoes to go with the sausage. I did another search on RecipeZaar to see what I could find because I conveniently had bought a bag of sweet potatoes at Trader Joe's last week. I really had no idea what I was going to do with them, other than maybe puree them for the baby to eat since he refuses to eat baby food anymore. This sounded easy, I had all the ingredients on hand, and it was listed as kid-friendly. And I figured without the honey in it the baby could have some too.

Apparently it's an Emeril recipe.

Emeril's Sweet Potato Mash
RecipeZaar Recipe #381427

4 sweet potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
2 quarts water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
salt & freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons honey

In a large pot over high heat, bring the sweet potatoes and water to a boil. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes or until the sweet potatoes are tender.

Drain well and return to the pot.

Add butter, salt and pepper to taste, cinnamon and honey and mash until all ingredients are combined.

Serve immediately.

*****

I used to not really like sweet potatoes, except at Thanksgiving with the marshmallows on top, and really then I always considered the sweet potatoes to be merely a vessel for the marshmallows. I don't know at what point I've started enjoying them, but it's been pretty recent. Actually over the weekend I had some sweet potato fries that were really yummy. I digress. This is one of the first times I've made sweet potatoes, and I have to say I was really quite pleased with how they came out, even though the recipe is pretty fool-proof. Everyone at my table liked them. The baby tore through his bowl, the husband had seconds, I scarfed down my portion. Yum. Super easy and a great new side dish to add to my arsenal!