Recipe Exchange: Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes

Amy of My Friend Amy has had another scathingly brilliant idea to do a fall recipe exchange. You can click on the icon to go her post with all the participating bloggers in the Mr. Linky list.

I would love to share with you a recipe I found in a magazine years ago: Pumpkin Ravioli (cheese ravioli with a pumpkin sauce). However, I can't. It's been so long since I've made it that I know I couldn't tell you how to do it off the top of my head. (I haven't made it for two reasons: I haven't been able to locate the recipe AND frozen ravioli is impossible to find here--although they have frozen pierogies by the boatload. And fresh ravioli is twice is expensive for half the product.)****

So instead, I'm going to share with you what I made for my Thanksgiving guests last night that had everyone going, "Mmmmm!" with every bite. Seriously, this is my new favorite way to make sweet potatoes.

I made my dish based on the recipe posted over at ZestyCook.com, but because the potatoes were gigantic and we were feeding seven or eight people with varying appetite levels, I changed it up a bit. You can do a good portion of this earlier in the day if you're serving an evening meal.

Twice-Baked Sweet Potatoes

6 lb. sweet potatoes
1/2 c. cream cheese (can use light)
3-4 t. vanilla
1/4 c. butter
3 T. brown sugar
1/4 c. toasted almond slices/slivers

1. Heat oven to 375.
2. Line a pan with foil (for easy cleanup) and bake sweet potatoes until tender. (Usually about an hour--my gigantic potatoes actually took 2.5.)
3. When potatoes have cooled enough to handle, peel them. Discard the skins.*
4. In mixing bowl, mash (or whip, if you're using a stand mixer) sweet potatoes. Add cream cheese, vanilla and butter.
5. Butter a casserole dish (I used an 8" x 12" dish, approx.) and pour in potatoes. At this point you can cover/refrigerate** it until about 45 minutes before serving.
6. Just before baking the second time, sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake 30-40 minutes.
7. Sprinkle with toasted almonds and serve.

* The original recipe calls for restuffing the skins in a traditional twice-baked potato fashion.
**It really depends on how long you're waiting before baking it again. And how much room you have in the fridge.

****Found it!!

Maggie and the Chocolate War by Michelle Mulder

Maggie and the Chocolate War is the kind of book I would have read and reread as a kid.

The setting is Victoria, British Columbia (Canada) in 1947, when war rations have been done away with, but the cost of all varieties of foodstuffs are skyrocketing, resulting in most families being worse off than they were with the rations. Maggie, our main character, is trying to earn enough money to buy her friend Jo a chocolate bar for her tenth birthday, but the cost of chocolate bars hikes up to eight cents right before Jo's birthday. Kids are furious, because there's no way they'll be able to afford their favorite treat when the cost nearly doubles overnight. So, inspired by a lesson they learned from their favorite teacher, they decide to protest. They even march on the legislature.

Maggie is a surprisingly complex character who has to consider various points of view; her dad is a shopkeeper selling eight cent candy bars, so the protests could affect their family's income and cause them to have pare down their budget even more. Maggie has to make decisions about how her actions are going to effect those around her, and she has to deal with the myriad emotions that accompany those decisions.

One of my favorite features of the book is that instead of illustrations, the images in the book are copies of real newspaper articles and pictures of the boycotting kids. There's even an ad in which a chocolate manufacturer tries to explain why the cost of candy bars had to go up. Extra kudos to the author (assuming it was the author's decision) for including these copies of primary sources.

I will be holding on to this charming and empowering book for my own kids to read someday, and I'll probably be sending my niece in the States* a copy, too, for when she's able to read on her own. (She's two weeks old.)


Many thanks to Emma at Second Story Press for sending me this book!

*If you're in the States reading this with your kid(s), you might want to have a map of Canada and a map of BC handy for a light geography lesson.

Eating for Energy by Yuri Elkaim

I asked to review Eating for Energy (from Mini Book Expo) because I spend four days a week at the gym, about two hours each day, and to be able to work harder and not be utterly exhausted by the end of the day would be wonderful. My only hope was that this book wouldn't ask me to completely revamp my eating habits in order to get it.

I was disappointed. Elkaim is a huge fan of the raw foods movement and discourages eating any kind of meat. Though he provides plenty of facts and statistics, I'm skeptical. I suspect there's a reason he has only a small headshot, instead of a picture including at least shoulders, on the back of the book. Plus, I felt like I was reading a bit by a fanatic infomercial host, one that yelled at me to try to make me listen and was occasionally condescending. I'm sure that was caused by the number of exclamation marks and bold words Elkaim used. Also, Elkaim's obsession with a long life and being slim/thin/skinny is not one I share.

I will be considering some of his workout advice and trying some of his recipes in the back of the book, but I can think of a number of people around here who might be more inclined to follow the entirety of Elkaim's guidelines. (People who already avoid chocolate chip cookies.) I'll probably end up bookcrossing this book and leaving it at the gym.