Sunday's Plate

Sweet potatoes from
World's Healthiest Foods

Although sweet potatoes may be part of the Thanksgiving tradition, be sure to add these wonderful naturally sweet vegetables to your meals throughout the year; they are some of the most nutritious vegetables around. Sweet potatoes can be found in your local markets year-round, however they are in season in November and December.

The sweet potato has yellow or orange flesh, and its thin skin may either be white, yellow, orange, red or purple. Sometimes this root vegetable will be shaped like a potato, being short and blocky with rounded ends, while other times it will be longer with tapered ends. There is often much confusion between sweet potatoes and yams; the moist-fleshed, orange-colored root vegetable that is often called a "yam" is actually a sweet potato.

Unique Proteins with Potent Antioxidant Effects

Sweet potato contain unique root storage proteins that have been observed to have significant antioxidant capacities. In one study, these proteins had about one-third the antioxidant activity of glutathione-one of the body's most impressive internally produced antioxidants. Although future studies are needed in this area, count on these root proteins to help explain sweet potatoes' healing properties.

For more information go HERE.

Comment: this is one of the wonderful articles about healthy eating From Food Navigator. It's one of those sites you can go to and explore all the things you've ever wanted to know about good nutrition and food.

Here are some things to do with sweet potatoes:

Bake like a regular potato and serve with butter, honey, or crumbled bacon and cheese.

Cut in wedges and baked like French fries. Skins stay on. Honey butter makes a great "ketchup."

Some people boil them and whip them with brown sugar and butter and make a kind of crust-less pie. They add all kinds of things like nuts and marshmallows to the top and re-heat in the oven until the marshmallows brown.

Some slice them and add ground oranges, nuts, coconut and or pineapple.

I like to glaze them with a glaze made from orange juice, butter and brown sugar boiled on the stove about three minutes. You can thicken this with cornstarch and water and then pour over the sliced potatoes. Then add your toppings and re-bake for about twenty minutes.

Here's a new recipe:

Boil, cool and cube your sweet potatoes (one for each person served). To the hot cheese sauce posted in the right isle of the blog just under the cookie recipe, add raw shrimp and scallops. It will take about three minutes for your fish to cook. Pour over sweet potatoes. Add a garnish of crumbled bacon and raw onions.

Sweet potatoes can be mashed and added to cake batters, muffins, and cubed and added to stews, soups and just about any dish.