CSA 23: Mashed Sweet Potato

I've gotten about 12 cumulative pounds of sweet potato over the last four weeks. And oh how sweet it is. It's some darn tasty tuber.

Sweet potatoes are often interchanged with yams, although they actually are different vegetables.  Yams are larger and not quite as sweet.  But both are excellent sources of fiber, healthy carbohydrates and beta carotene.

I've done a few things with them, such as sweet potato oven fries. Oven fries are super easy: cut one sweet potato into fry shapes, toss in a bit of olive oil, bake about 30 minutes, and toss with some Adobo. Done. Yum.

But mostly I bake it, then skin and mash it. My directions below assume you'll be using shaker top seasoning and are per one medium to large sweet potato; Increase the other ingredients as you increase the number of sweet potatoes. And even though they really are sweet I add brown sugar because it really is just super tasty... and because I'm a grown up and I can eat sugar for dinner if I want to. Same with real butter. My philosophy is use small amounts of the best ingredients instead of more of a substitute ingredient. And they make this nifty granulated brown sugar now that doesn't clump and dry out. So it’s easy, delicious, and really honest ingredients.

Do make sure you put the sweet potatoes on something to bake them.  I have a pizza stone permanently in my oven so it’s not an issue for me, but any baking sheet or even just a piece of aluminum foil would work fine.  They are so sweet they actually will ooze a bit of sweet goop as they bake.  This ooze is actually quite helpful – when the goop puddle is about the size of a quarter, you know the sweet potatoes are done baking.

Sweet Potato
1 sweet potato
1 tsp butter
8-10 shakes of cinnamon
1-3 shakes of clove
1 tsp brown sugar

Preheat your oven and scrub the sweet potato, leaving slightly damp.  You can cut off any stray roots, but leave the skin on.  Bake the sweet potato for about an hour at 350 degrees. Remove from the oven, cut in half and carefully, because its hella hot, pop the insides out of the skins into a bowl. Per 1 sweet potato add 8-10 shakes of cinnamon, 1-3 shakes of clove, 1 teaspoon butter and 1 teaspoon brown sugar. Mash with a potato masher. Enjoy.