Hi you guys! Sweet potatoes have long been a staple in our house and I thought I’d share a few recipes in honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. One of these was a staple of my childhood Thanksgivings. A recipe my mom clipped from a magazine back in the day. Another, a friend introduced me to years ago and we eat it regularly throughout the colder months. The third recipe is new to me. I thought we would love the flavors and y’all it’s so good. It’s also very festive with the fresh herbs and dried cranberries! I hope you all will love these less traditional sweet potato sides as much a we do. No marshmallows in sight!
Roasted Grape and Goat Cheese Sweet Potatoes: https://www.howsweeteats.com/2012/01/roasted-grape-goat-cheese-honey-stuffed-sweet-potatoes/
Moroccan Sweet Potato Salad: https://www.cookingclassy.com/moroccan-sweet-potato-salad/
Berry Treasure Puffs (I actually found a website that had the recipe!): http://www.grouprecipes.com/79292/berried-treasure-puffs.html
#recipe #holidayrecipes #thanksgiving #fromscratch #cooking
Hi you guys. Welcome back to Rocket City Yardstead. I am busy scrubbing up sweet potatoes because I thought today in honor of our upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, we would make a few sweet potato dishes. Two of these are tried and trueue recipes in my family. One of them is a dish my mom used to make for Thanksgiving all the time that I’ll be honest, I didn’t really appreciate so much as a kid. my palette wasn’t quite as refined enough as it needed to be to appreciate it back then. Um, another one is a dish that a friend introduced me to years ago and we just love it. And then the third one is new to me but full of flavors that I really love. And so I thought we could make these together because every single one of them would be a beautiful side dish for your Thanksgiving table. No marshmallows or brown sugar in sight with these dishes either. So, something a little bit different from the norm. So, I’m going to finish getting these scrubbed up and then we’re going to get a few of them into the oven to roast. So, I have six sweet potatoes total. We’re going to use two each for the three recipes. And the ones that I’m going to roast, the recipes typically call for roasting them whole, but you cut the potatoes in half for both recipes. So, it makes sense to me to roast them cut in half. I do this with regular potatoes as well. And oh man, y’all, this is a hard sweet potato. Um, oh, it’s going a little further. But you cut your baking time in half when you cut the sweet potatoes in half. So, I figured I would just get a jump start on that because this works really well when I do it with regular potatoes and so I figured it would work for our sweet potatoes. There we go. Finally. It did not want to cut open. These are just going straight onto a parchment line sheet. No salt, no oil, nothing. We’re going to put them cut side down and they are going to roast for 25 to 30 minutes. We’re just looking for our sweet potatoes to be nice and tender. I am adapting a couple of these recipes to fit our dietary needs. So, the recipe that my mom used to make actually called for the canned yams that you buy at the grocery store that are in like a sweet syrup. Those have corn syrup in them, so I can’t have them. And so, we’re going to use freshly home roasted sweet potatoes here. But, if you want to use candy yams, you absolutely can. I did notice that they had zero sugar candy yams. this year. I don’t know how long they’ve had those. So, if you don’t mind something like Splenda, you could also use those. So, you guys, I am just working on peeling the other two sweet potatoes I have here. The third recipe calls for peeled and cubed sweet potatoes. You want about a 3/4 in cube on these, but it occurred to me that I have not told you guys what any of these recipes are. So, one of them is the recipe that I don’t remember a time before, honestly. It is called Berry Treasure Puffs, and it is whipped sweet potatoes or candy yams if you want to go that route. And they get whipped up into a nice fluffy texture with an egg. They have crushed pineapple and cranberry sauce in them. And then you bake it in the oven. Like I said, this is a recipe that as a kid I didn’t fully appreciate, but as an adult, I really love all of the flavors of it. Then the other sweet potato that we’re roasting at the moment is for roasted goat cheese and honey sweet potatoes, y’all. It’s so good. I am making a bit of an adaption there because we don’t eat dairy anymore in our house. So, I have some dairyfree feta I’m going to use instead. But the goat cheese is phenomenal. And who would have ever thought of roasted grapes being delicious? But y’all, it’s just one of my favorite ways to eat sweet potatoes. And then this dish is a Moroccan spiced warm sweet potato salad. It’s full of all of those warming spices that I love. Cinnamon, cumin, ginger, um, what else? Coriander, just a bunch of lovely flavors. And then it’s loaded with fresh herbs. So, tons of cilantro and parsley, mint if you want. And you toss that all in with a dressing at the very end. So, you have the roasted sweet potatoes with the warm spices and then that fresh pop of the herbs. I’ve never made this before, but I’m certain that it’s going to be delicious. Oh, it also has dried cranberries in it. And so, I feel like it would be a beautiful addition to a Thanksgiving table. Just all of the beautiful colors and the flavors. So, that is what we are making. I’m going to get these sweet potatoes chopped up. save. I am going to deviate from the recipe just a little bit on these roasted Moroccan sweet potatoes, drizzling them with oil. Then at this point, it calls for a little bit of salt and pepper. So, I am going to add those. But the recipe has you put most of the spices in the dressing. And I think I would prefer to put them on my sweet potatoes as they roast because they will get nice and toasted with the oil that’s on our sweet potatoes and that will intensify the flavor a little bit. So I just added some cumin to add some paprika. I only have smoked paprika, but the recipe does not call for that. It just calls for regular. We’re going to add some ground ginger, some ground coriander, and if you don’t know, ground coriander is the seeds of cilantro. I know most of the world refers to all of the cilantro plant as coriander, but here in the US we only call the seeds coriander. Now for some cinnamon. And lastly, it calls for cayenne pepper, which I don’t have. So, I am going to add just a little bit of red pepper flake. And that will give us that heat. I’m gonna add a little more oil, I think, just to help with all the spices. And then we’re gonna toss this all together and get our sweet potatoes nice and coated. Dump these out on a tray. get my parchment paper pulled back. And you might have noticed there, this is actually like a pizza tray. I am going to cook this in my Advantium, which is a microwave slash convent convection oven. Um, and this is the tray I have that fits in there. So, I just put parchment paper down to cover the pizza holes. If you can hear the beeping through the microphone, that is actually the oven, the Advantium oven telling me that it’s ready. This tray is packed a little bit more tightly than I would like it to be because we want these to roast and not steam. So, if you can spread them out more than this, I would encourage it. All right, our sweet potato cubes are going to roast for 20 minutes. We’re going to come back at 10 minutes and give them a toss. All right, so now we can move on to getting some of the other elements of our sweet potato dishes ready. I have a heaping cup of grapes here that I’m going to get washed up. The grapes are just one of my favorite parts of this recipe. So, I tend to like to go a little bit heavy. And I am going to fry these off really well because for our goat cheese or my case dairyfree feta roasted sweet potatoes with roasted grapes, we are going to pop these grapes into a 450°ree oven and roast them for around 20 to 25 minutes. They do actually burst and get just nice and roasty and soften a little bit. Oh, they’re so good, you guys. So, I’m going to drizzle a little bit of oil on here, some salt, and pepper. Give these a nice shake. Get them all nice and coated in the oil, the salt and pepper. And then when our sweet potatoes come out of the oven, I’m going to bump that temperature up to 450. And these are going to roast for 20 to 25 minutes. Our timer went off on our sweet potatoes and I want to test them. I can tell they probably need another 5 to 10 minutes. So, we will let those roast for a little bit more time. While my sweet potatoes finish roasting, I am going to get the pineapple drained for my berry treasure puffs. So, this recipe called for an 8 and 3/4 oz can of pineapple. I couldn’t find that. This is a 20 oz. So, I’m going to go for about half the can. That’ll be a little bit of extra pineapple, but not too much. Not too much more. And you do want this drained really well because we don’t want it to make our sweet potato soupy. You could squeeze it. I’m just using a spoon and a strainer and pushing it through. This is not a job I do all that frequently myself. I mainly strain pineapple for carrot cake around the holidays and one of my nieces normally helps me strain the pineapple. I also have a jar of home canned whole cranberry sauce out. You can use storebought cranberry sauce if that’s what you use, that’s what you prefer. Um, but we’re going to mix that in with our sweet potatoes and pineapple. I think our pineapple is really well drained. So, we’re going to move on to the salad dressing for our sweet potato salad. Like I mentioned earlier, I did do things a little bit differently and I put all of those warming spices on the potatoes while they’re roasting. So, the recipe actually calls for adding those to our vinegrett. So, the way I’m doing this, the vinegrett might seem a little bit bland, but once we pour it all over the potatoes, it’s going to have all of these lovely flavors. But the first thing I need to do is mince up some garlic. The recipe called for one clove. That doesn’t seem like quite enough to me. So, I am actually going to up that to two. And I know some people who would add even more than that. So, I would say just go with your garlic preferences. If you are someone who likes to follow a recipe to a tea, I’m going to link this down below for you and you can do exactly what they say to do in the recipe. But if you like to finagle a little bit, add however much garlic you want. Get that into my jar here. We’re going to add 2 and 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice. I am just using bottled lemon juice, but if you want, you can use fresh. We’re going to grate some zest from this orange. It calls for half a teaspoon. Oh, it smells so good. I think that’s probably going to end up being about most of this orange zesting it. So, that’s going to add some lovely flavor. All those orange essential oils smell so good. I have a timer going off over here. Our cubed sweet potato is done. I just tasted one. Perfect texture. So, it’s good thing we’re working on the dressing. The timer went off for other sweet potatoes and they are nice and tender. So, this did take an extra 10 minutes. That’s just going to happen depending on the size of your sweet potatoes. They might take a little bit less time. They might take a little bit more depending on how big they are. All right. So, we’re going to get that about a half a teaspoonish of orange zest in there. And then I need to juice this orange. I probably only need to juice part of it. We only need about a tablespoon of orange juice. I love this time of year when the fresh citrus is really good. There we go. Tablespoon of orange juice. I’m going to add some pepper to this and some salt. The last thing we need is 3 tablespoon of oil. Then we just want to get this all whisked up. Normally, I would grab a lid and shake it up, but I saw somebody use their frothing tool the other day, and I wanted to give it a try. That actually did a really nice job of mixing the salad dressing together and getting it nice and emulsified. So, if you have a coffee frother or a milk frother, give it a go. for salad dressing. I have the oven preheated to 450 for our grapes. So, these are going to go in there for 20 minutes. So, we want to dump our nice warm sweet potatoes into a bowl and we’re going to pour our dressing all over the top. We want to stir this up. Get it nice and coated. And we’re going to let this sit for about five minutes and stir it somewhere in the middle because we want the sweet potatoes to actually absorb all of that yummy dressing. So, while this is resting, I’m going to get our herbs chopped up, our dried cranberries, and our nuts out to put in here. All right. I’ve got a handful of cilantro here and a handful of parsley. It also says you can use mint. I think that would be delicious, but they were out of mint at my local store. And all I have in my garden is chocolate mint, so that didn’t really seem appropriate. We’re just going to chop this up nicely. It’s okay if there’s some big chunks in there. You’ll just get a nice herby hit in your mouth. And then it calls for/4 cup of cranberries. I like my cranberries a little bit finer than just a whole dried cranberry. So I am going to chop these. But that’s a personal preference issue. And that might be closer to half a cup. But I’m okay with extra cranberries. All right, I think this is ready to assemble. So, there is still a little bit of dressing in the bottom. Not much. We’re going to toss in our cranberries and our herbs. So, this is a substitution I’m making just to make it work for us. I can’t eat almonds, so I’m using pumpkin seeds. But the recipe calls for half a cup of toasted slivered almonds. That would be delicious. But the pumpkin seeds are going to give us that crunch and that element that we would be missing if we just omitted the nuts. Toss this up. And this salad is done, y’all. It smells so good because these potatoes are still a bit warm and those fresh herbs hitting those warm potatoes. Oh, it smells amazing. But I’m going to bring you over and show you what it looks like. Isn’t it pretty? It would be beautiful in a nice serving bowl. Now that our Moroccan sweet potato salad is done, we can move on to our berry treasure puffs. So, I am just scooping all of this soft sweet potato flesh out of two of these sweet potatoes. The recipe called for about a pound and a half of the candy yams. So, we’re just trying to replicate that. You can see how nice and soft these potatoes are. And they would have taken me so much longer if I left them whole. You could also probably boil your potatoes if you wanted to. They would probably cook faster, but I think they tend to get a little bit water logged. That might not matter so much in this instance because the recipe calls for the canned yams and they’ve been cooked in a syrup. So, just a thought. So, to our potatoes, we are going to add our drained pineapple. We’re going to add one egg. We’re going to add half a cup of cranberry sauce, salt, pepper, some nutmeg, about 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg, and then 2 tablebsp of butter. I’m using dairyfree butter because we don’t eat dairy, but feel free to use regular butter. And then we’re going to whisk this all up until it’s nice and fluffy. Grab a spatula and scrape my sides down here. I’m just going to use my pineapple spoon and give this a taste. I know some people might not because of the raw egg, but I’m going to I think because I used fresh sweet potatoes instead of the candy yams, I’m going to add just a little bit of maple syrup to this to add a little bit more sweetness. But you don’t have to do that. Or if you use the candy yams, it will already be sweeter. So you guys, I’ve had a little bit of a technical difficulty today, and some of my video footage has not come through well. But my berry treasure puff is in the oven baking at 375 for about 40 minutes. What you did not get to see in video was that I just put little dollops of cranberry sauce on top of it once I put it into that rakin or baking dish, I guess, and kind of swirled it into the top. That’s how my mom always did it. And so that’s how I did it. The recipe actually calls for putting it in individual ramicans, but that’s just not how I grew up eating it. So I figured I would make it like I remember it. But now we are on to our roasted grape sweet potatoes. So I am being very careful here scooping out my roasted sweet potato. Because I am going to put these back in the potato skins kind of like a twice baked potato. I tried to pick the nicest looking of my potatoes for this one. I just figured that was the most important thing for this dish was having the prettier potatoes. The other potatoes we either peeled or just scooped them out and discarded the skin. We are going to mash these sweet potatoes up. But first, I’m going to add about 2 tablespoon of honey. about three oz of for me my dairyfree feta. I would definitely urge you to use the goat cheese if you can have dairy because it is so good. I’m going to do some salt and pepper. Then I’m just going to use my potato masher and get in here and mash this all up. Now, I do expect using this dairyfree feta that it is going to stay in kind of visible chunks. The goat cheese will blend in more and really incorporate well. I’m going to grab a spoon and give this a taste and see if it needs any more salt or pepper. Nope. Those are really good. So, I’m going to swap my bowl and my potato skins here. Try and open these up. And we will scoop potato back into them. I feel like if you are like me and have developed some food sensitivities over the years, this is a good example of just pivot a little bit and find ways to make the dishes that you love. You know, I love this dish with the goat cheese. It is so good, but I my body just doesn’t tolerate dairy anymore. And so I have to find ways to live without the dairy. And I could just make always dairyfree recipes and just not try and find alternatives, but I feel like doing something like this makes you feel less like you’re missing out. And yes, these dairy alternative cheeses, they are fairly expensive, and I know I have them in a lot of my videos, but they are not like an everyday food for us. They’re, you know, maybe once a week. Some weeks we don’t have any, but just when we’re wanting something cheesy, it’s nice to have an option. All right. So, I let these potatoes cool quite a lot. They are down to room temperature. So, because of that, we are going to pop them into the oven. There’s 15 minutes left on our other sweet potato dish. And so, we’re just going to pop them in there to get warm again. Our berry treasure puffs are done and ready to come out of the oven, but I wanted to show you what they look like since I had trouble earlier filming. Just swirled in some of that cranberry sauce on top. Our goat cheese and honey sweet potatoes are done. I’m just going to put them on a platter. And then to finish off our goat cheese sweet potatoes, we’re just going to bat them with grapes. These roasted grapes are so good. Now, these have cooled down to room temperature, and quite honestly, you want them cooler. the flavor comes through stronger and honestly when you eat them straight out of the oven, you burn your mouth really badly. Ask me how I know. But I just think this is such a lovely dish. I kind of push them in a little bit just so they don’t roll off, but that on our grapes. Steal one from one of these for back here. I may have I may have sampled the grapes, you guys. That might be why we’re short one. And then the finishing touch here is just a little drizzle of honey on top. Oh, you know what? I forgot you guys. I forgot to sprinkle some more cheese on top. I knew something looked a little bit off. There we go. Just a little. Oh, yeah. That makes it look better, doesn’t it? I grabbed three spoons so we can give all of these a taste test. I’m familiar with both of these. So, let’s go for the Moroccan sweet potato salad first. It smells amazing with all of those spices and the herbs and the citrus in it. And it looks beautiful, too. It’s so good. I’ve never used orange with these kind of spices before, and I really like it. That orange zest, I’m sure, has to be the main orange flavor we’re getting because we only used a tablespoon of the juice. But that citrus with the fresh herbs and all of those warm spices is so good. I also really like the pop of sweet you get from the dried cranberries and then the little bit of crunch from, in my case, the pumpkin seeds. It’s just fantastic. I would make this just to eat like on a week night. We would maybe eat it with like roast chicken or um like a piece of salmon and I think it would be fantastic. So, let’s move on to the berry treasure puff. Make sure get some of the cranberry sauce with it. And yeah, I think everything else should be all mixed in well. I’m a little ashamed that I didn’t like this as a child because my adult palette thinks it’s fantastic. You get the sweet and the tangy and the tart and it’s just such a nice combination. And I really like the texture of it. Well, too. The sweet potatoes are nice and smooth and creamy, but then you get a little bit of texture from the pineapple and the cranberries. So good. So, last one, our goat cheese, or in my case, the dairyfree feta sweet potatoes with roasted grapes. This is the first time I’ve made it with the dairyfree feta. I’ve only ever made it with the goat cheese. Love it with the goat cheese. So, let’s see how it is with the feta. The feta does a really nice job replacing that tangy thing that you get from the goat cheese. This is just one of my favorite side dishes. I love it so much. We actually eat it quite a bit in the winter. But, as you can see, it makes a beautiful side for a holiday. So, I hope if you guys like sweet potatoes but are tired of the traditional sweet potato sides for Thanksgiving and Christmas, maybe you’ll give one of these a try. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I will link all of these recipes down below. I hope you have a wonderful day and I’ll see you next time. I
1 Comment
Hey girl, gonna try all and so excited. Love sweet potatoes and you have a fan. We only get the dried cranberries but we're going to try them all. Love Cape Town South Africa. ❤❤❤