I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I know I did.  We had dinner at some friends’ house who were hosting a group of the misfits (mostly from Cincinnati) for the holiday. 

My plate of food on Thanksgiving.

The hosts cooked a bunch of the food, but I volunteered to bring over a couple of dishes to share.  I choose to make the sweet potatoes and a green bean casserole.  After hearing that someone at the party either was allergic to or didn’t like mushrooms, I decided to try something different for the green bean casserole.  I found this recipe and followed the directions exactly.  This dish turned out great, but I wasn’t overly impressed with it.  Maybe it was just all of the great food that was prepared, but I think it could have had even more flavor.  Still a very pleasing alternative to the traditional casserole. 

Grandma's Green Bean Casserole.

I settled on this recipe for the sweet potatoes, mostly because it was the highest rated sweet potato dish I could find.  Let me say that I would have to agree with the rating on this one, it was delicious, and seemed to be the favorite of many of our group.  With that said, I had a few problems with the recipe, which I again tried to follow exactly.  It seemed that my sweet potatoes weren’t nearly done enough after only fifteen minutes in boiling water.  I removed them from the water at that time and I couldn’t mash them at all.  I returned them to boiling water for another ten minutes, and I still had problems mashing.  Unfortunately I didn’t realize the problem before I added the sauce to the potatoes.  So rather than boiling them anymore, I was forced to put them into the oven to cook. 

I baked them for around ten minutes, and finally I was able to start mashing some of the potatoes, though not nearly half as the recipe indicated.  Again, I baked them for another ten minutes and finally I was able to get half of the potatoes mashed.  I think that cutting the potatoes up into smaller pieces at the start would have helped fix my problem.  I had another problem with the last step of adding marshmallows to the top and baking until brown.  It seems my dish was a little too liquidy, and the sauce was boiling rapidly in the oven, which quickly disintegrated most of the marshmallows.  Rather than trying again, I simply mixed the remaining marshmallows into the dish and watched them melt.  Despite these issues, the sweet potatoes were excellent. 

In rushing to get the potatoes finished, I forgot to take a photo of them.  You will just have to trust me that they looked as delicious as they tasted.