Sweet Potatoes: From moderate failure to triumphant success

So I, like most everyone, decided to make a sweet potato dish for my thanksgiving dinner last week. And, trying to be clever and make stuff up ahead of time, decided to peel, slice, coat in olive oil, and roast the sweet potatoes on Wednesday, toss it together into a casserole that night, and basically just have to heat it up on Thursday. Which I did. After slicing and roasting them for an hour or so, I tossed in some brown sugar and let them sit until I got around to them again. At which point, I added a bit of orange juice and nutmeg and tossed the potatoes again. I then made a topping with chopped walnuts, a bit of flour, some cinnamon and nutmeg, and poured some of the orange juice/olive oil liquid from the potatoes in with it, and then sprinkled all that on in a layer over the sweet potatoes. Put it in the oven with the turkey when there was about an hour or so left before lunch and then was served with dinner. Tasted great...except...the consistency of most of the sweet potatoes was a bit chewier than I would like. Only a few were actually soft, and I have no real words to describe how off they were. Everyone took a few polite bites, but they were not exactly the star of the meal.

Faced with a nearly full pan of sweet potato "casserole" I decided to get inventive with my leftovers. I tossed the potatoes (it was generally easy to separate out the nuts) into a food processor and pureed them as best I could. Then I used it to make sweet potato bread. I generally followed the recipe for pumpkin bread in the Betty Crocker cookbook, leaving out most of the spices (since the potatoes were already flavored), and trying to balance out the liquid to flour ratio. One loaf disappeared that very night and the other one made it to work but was gone by the end of the day. So I'd say that whether or not your sweet potatoes turn out right, it's pretty easy to turn your sweet potato casserole into sweet potato bread - nuts and all.

Thyme