Sweet Potatoes

springlering62

Y'all, I’m 62 years old and I’ve never had a baked sweet potato til this Thanksgiving.

What’s something you’d add to a sweet potato for lunch or a snack ? Especially to amp up protein?

Corina1143

I'm definitely not a sweets eater and I know you are.
But my favorite dessert is
About equal amounts baked sweet potato and cottage cheese in the blender for way longer than you think it needs. Then in the fridge overnight. I make enough for 4 or 5 nights. Makes a mousse-like consistency.
The original recipe said vanilla, sugar and cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, or your favorite spice.
I love baked sweet potatoes!

SafariGalNYC

A few recipes I like for sweet potato: 🍠

I like dicing leftover Sweet potatoes and putting in an omelette or frying with 2 eggs.

Cubed sweet potato, avocado and chicken salad.

Also- if you like ricotta cheese or cottage cheese. Get potato nice and hot and split down middle - spoon in the cheese.

herblovinmom

Mmmmm, love me some sweet potatoes.
I like shredded pork or bbq chicken on mine like a baked potato but sweet spud form. I also like to dice em up and add black beans and eggs and chorizo like a hash. Or even doing a beefy chili with sweet potatoes instead of or in addition to beans.. I only eat them candied, with brown sugar and marshmallows, on Thanksgiving , and I used to work at a bbq joint and we made sweet potato pies, now those are amazing. Not anything I’ve ever made at home though. Happy experimenting.. what about sweet potato fries with a little Cajun seasoning?.. mmmmm now I’m gonna go eat some leftover yams.. 😋

acpgee

I would do tinned baked beans, crumbled feta or halloumi.

springlering62

Oh these are awesome ideas, y'all!!!!

@Corina1143 what a neat idea. wasn’t it you who came up with the pumpkin pudding Greek yogurt mousse? I made a big batch of that for Thanksgiving and just finished it up today.

@acpgee ironically, I had my husband pick up several packets of halloumi from the Persian grocery just this afternoon. No one sells it near me any more. 😢

Doggone Lidl, every time I find something I just love, they discontinue it. They had terrific halloumi, cheap. Not no more. 🤬

They don’t even have store brand cottage cheese right now. I go through four tubs of cottage cheese every week. It’s a large part of my grocery budget. Their’s was less than half the cost of the pelletized, sloppy wet Daisy and was way better. I don’t know if it’s a supply issue or if they’ve stopped selling it.

Anyway, great ideas. I got a sweet potato today and will be trying to bake it on my own.

AnnPT77

One of my favorite things to do with sweet potatoes is to chunk them up (usually after baking whole) and use them with black beans. A couple of examples:

* A restaurant around here used to make soft tacos (corn tortillas, I think) filled with chunks of sweet potato, black beans, and cotija cheese. Memory is squishy, but they probably also had some onions/garlic, spices (though not intense), maybe herbs, maybe served with some kind of salsa, maybe sour cream on the side, too? I've made variations of that at home, with guacamole or Greek yogurt involved, too, but no recipes. I don't recipe often.

* While I've been recuperating, a friend brought me a big container of black bean chili with chunks of sweet potato and other veggies in it, a hint of heat but not overpowering, and corn muffins to eat with it. I don't have a recipe, but maybe the concept works if you're a wing-it cook like me. It was tasty!

I also went to a deli-style restaurant on a couple of rowing-spectator trips that had a stuffed sweet potato on the menu. There were various options, and again I'm a little fuzzy on details, but I know mine had some cooked but nicely crisp broccoli, and probably some kind of cheese, maybe other stuff.

I think this would be a case where cottage cheese in the mix of stuffing ingredients could be good, maybe back to the black beans again, and certainly you could put in chicken or some similar mild meat . . . maybe even some heartier meats. It's been so long since I intentionally ate meat (1974!) that it's hard to imagine how those flavors would combine with others, though I can remember the basic flavors of some. I think chili and cheese might have been one of the deli's options for stuffing the sweet potatoes, but I can't recall that for sure, either. (If I remembered the restaurant's name, I'd look it up . . . but I don't.)

I haven't done it with sweet potatoes, but have with pumpkin, so I think it could work: Savory custard, kind of like what's in pumpkin pie but savory, certainly with eggs and milk/cream, seasonings of choice, but I think one could add some cheese and drive it in a quiche-like direction, too.

Speaking of which, I'd happily put chunks of sweet potato in quiche, frittatas, omelets, and that sort of thing, maybe even smaller chunks/slices in pancakes.

Another thing I have tried, and happily so, was making a crust for quiche-y or other savory pie with thin, overlapped slices of sweet potato. Without re-consulting it, I think the recipe I used started with raw potatoes, sliced then pre-baked in the pie pan for a while before filling. I'm betting slicing cooked ones, making sure the overlap sealed/stuck things together, then filling/baking, would work OK, too. I can look up the recipe if you want it, I'm just being lazy.

That's all I can think of at the moment, off the cuff.

Corina1143

Didn't think of it earlier.
The healthy deli near me makes steak, eggs, a side of finely chopped sweet potatoes fried in a neutral oil.
I love it.
They also make a hash with ground turkey, eggs, and the same sweet potatoes. I don't like it. But they're still making it 10+ years later, so someone must.

Adventurista

We traditionally boiled the light brown/whitish skinned, yellow inside sweet potatoes (upper right version) whole, then cooled and peeled, sliced crosswise in 1/4" rounds and then candied by frying in butter and brown sugar - for the feasts.

When i started exploring squash and sweet potatoes in non-candy ways, I was surprised how sweet these are naturally. I was also surprised that pumpkin in cans can include squash or yams/sweet potatoes in the blend in the can, who knew?

I like to bake 2 or 3 delicata squash or the sweet potatoes (upper right) and keep on hand to use instead of baked potato or instead of ways butternut squash recipes would be used - such as chunks in stir fries or in black bean chili or stew. For snacks, i like 1/2 of one with some diced meat and shred cheese warmed.

and when skins are tender in potatoes or squash varieties, i do eat the skins because of the fiber and nutrition in the skins.

acpgee

My quick way of baking sweet potatoes starts them for 5 minutes in the microwave. Prick with a fork first to prevent them from bursting out of their skins. Then finish for 10 minutes in the air fryer to dry them out.

AnnPT77

Sweet potatoes are also good with apples, pineapple, walnuts or wild rice . . . none of which are great sources of protein.

FWIW, this is the sweet potato quiche crust I used, though I didn't make that specific quiche in it.

https://www.eatingwell.com/recipe/8028382/spinach-feta-quiche-sweet-potato-crust/

springlering62

You guys are the best. I can ask y'all anything and get such great ideas! Thanks for sharing!!!!

acpgee

For easy protein toppings for snacking on baked sweet potato let me add tinned refried beans as well as my original suggestion of tinned baked beans. Ready made refried beans aren't commonly available here in the UK but imagine they are widely available in supermarkets in the US.

springlering62

Recipe for low cal, no oil, minimal ingredient, no fry refried beans, from dry in a crockpot. These are amazing:

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/70312/refried-beans-without-the-refry/

I use half black beans and half pinto.