Summer of Sweet... Potatoes?

About author / Jerri Manthey

Reality tv star; personal chef; die-hard foodie. Try her vegetarian French onion soup - you won't be sorry

So yes, if you live in the Midwest or the South, you're probably thinking, "Now wait a minute.  Sweet potatoes are for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  And right now, it's summer.  What ARE you thinking, Jerri Manthey?"

Growing up, the only time I got to enjoy eating sweet potatoes was at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  My mom would bake them, peel them, add butter and brown sugar, lay them out in a shallow baking dish, top them with marshmallows and bake them again until the marshmallows were toasty brown.  This seemed to be the only time of year something so decadently sweet and candy-like was served, and I ate them until my stomach hurt.

It wasn't until I was working for a family, filling in as their private chef, that I started baking sweet potatoes on a regular basis.  I would store them pre-cooked in the refrigerator in single servings for the woman of the house and she would eat about half of a large sweet potato a day.  I began to see the beauty in a sweet potato.  

All alone, plain baked and served sliced, they are full of natural yummy sweetness and are incredibly filling.  With somewhere around 0.1 grams of fat in a medium-sized sweet potato and 3.4 grams of fiber, it was also a great addition for anyone on a diet.  Yes, there are also around 28 grams of carbohydrates, which may seem high to those on the Atkins diet.  But I truly believe that as long as you're up and moving around, it's not a bad thing.  The human body needs carbohydrates for energy.

Now, this being said, the recipe I am about to share with you is not the pre-cooked, sliced, refrigerated in single serving Tupperware healthy version I mentioned above.  This recipe is one I stumbled upon around Thanksgiving time when looking for a new way to make them.  It turns out I liked them enough to make them again and again throughout the year.  They are a great addition to grilled steaks, chicken, or--my personal choice--with pork chops.

A huge tip in storing sweet potatoes:  NEVER store them in the refrigerator, as their flavor tends to be lost.  I myself was guilty of this for years.

Also, to answer the common question of the difference between yams and sweet potatoes:  these are the two basic types of sweet potato:  moist (orange-fleshed) and dry (yellow-fleshed).  The orange moist version is a bit sweeter and in the U.S. market is known as a sweet potato.  The starchier, yellow fleshed type is commonly called a yam.  However, a true yam is a large (up to 100 pounds) root vegetable mostly found only in Africa and Asia.

So, without further ado . . .

Serves/Makes: 8

• 1/3 cup bourbon
• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
• 5 pounds sweet potatoes (sometimes called yams)
• 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1/3 cup butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract