What in the world am I gonna do with all those sweet potatoes?

It’s sweet potato harvest time and what a bounty. They’ve been dug and cured and are ready to be eaten. We’ve eaten them several times but there’s still so many left! 

Properly cured they should last well in a cool dark place. I prefer to store them in ways where I don’t have to worry about whether mold or bugs are getting to them.  George W. Carver’s treatise on sweet potatoes written in 1936 still contains everything you need to know about growing, harvesting, and storing sweet potatoes.  https://northfloridavegheadz.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-definitive-traditional-guide-to.html

This year I boiled all my sweet potatoes.  Some years I roast them.  The peeled and mashed sweet potatoes are then ready for a multitude of recipes.  

Today I made a sweet potato pie.  I chose to make it crustless and I used fat-free sweetened condensed milk.  It would have worked fine with Eggbeaters too.  And to really lighten it up, evaporated milk could be substituted for the sweetened condensed milk.  The addition of a little sugar in whatever form would make it a delicious and very healthy recipe.  The recipe is Sharon Rigsby’s from the Tallahassee Democrat this week.  There was filling left over so I baked it in ramekins for individual servings. I divided up the rest of the mashed sweet potatoes and froze them in vacuum packs in two cup batches, and I made sweet potato black bean quesadillas and vacuum sealed them. Actually I still have a few of the quesadillas left from last year and they kept perfectly, ready to be used on a moments notice, no thawing.

Some tips on vacuum sealing mashed sweet potatoes – make sure you don’t get any sweet potatoes in the area of the seal. I managed this by tucking the vacuum bag into a container – I used a cup from my Nutribullet, it was just the right diameter—and folding the edge over far enough so I could spoon the sweet potatoes in without getting near the sealing edge. Once the pack is sealed and the seal has cooled, you can flatten the package to store more conveniently in the freezer. Be sure to label it. It’s best to do that before you start filling it, which I never remember.

Links to the recipes for the quesadillas and sweet potato pie are below for your enjoyment along with a link to a recipe for my family’s favorite sweet potato casserole.

Sweet Potato Pie:  http://blogs.tallahassee.com/community/2021/11/08/easy-southern-sweet-potato-pie/

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Quesadillas:  https://oazarecipes.blogspot.com/2020/10/sweet-potato-and-black-bean-quessadillas.html

Sweet Potato Casserole:  https://oazarecipes.blogspot.com/2016/01/rocky-springs-sweet-potatoes.html