Fall is my favorite time of the year, and with it comes my favorite holiday: THANKSGIVING! I love getting together with people I love and sharing wonderful food. This year I want to be actually bring a dish myself (instead of just helping my mom) to be a contributing adult. Also, I just love making delicious food, and this was a great motivation to test out some new recipes!
Picking the right recipe was tricky. I wanted it to be something I can eat (no refined sugar, no grains, no dairy) but also something that people without restrictive diets would enjoy and not think was “too healthy” to be tried. That limited my options, but I found a great sweet potato dish, and thought I would give it a try to see if it would work for the big day.
So, after a longer than expected time in the kitchen (I don’t have a mandolin slicer, so I had to figure out how to work the food processor, and the onions made me cry), I came out with a delectable dish to my delight to make for Thanksgiving. I found the recipe here: http://thehealthyfoodie.com/2011/11/18/sweet-potato-casserole-gratin-style/ , so all credit goes there. The Healthy Foodie’s dish turned out magazine worthy, but mine is not bad to look at and has a wonderful taste.
Ingredients:
- 4 large onions
- oil for caramelizing the onions
- 2 large sweet potatoes, I used about 8 small sweet potatoes
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp black pepper
- 1 c water
- 3 tblsp honey
- 1 tblsp mustard
- 1 tblsp rosemary
- Pinch of salt and pepper
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- Few shakes of nutmeg
- ½ to 1/3 c chopped pecans
- 1 tbsp honey
Putting it together:
- Preheat oven to 375.
- Slice onions into thin half moons (cut in half, then chop thin slices).
- Peel and slice sweet potatoes very thinly ( I used a food processor which worked alright, but a mandolin slicer would probably work better if you have one available!)
- Heat some oil in a large skillet on med. heat (I used a tablespoon or so of coconut oil)
- Add onions, salt and pepper. Cook until soft and caramelized, ~20 minutes.
- Take 1/3 of the sliced sweet potatoes and line the bottom of a rectangular baking dish, generously overlapping the slices.
- Take 1/2 of the caramelized onions and spread evenly over the sweet potato layer.
- Arrange another layer of sweet potatoes on top of the onions, again overlapping generously.
- Place the rest of the onions evenly over the potatoes.
- Put final 1/3 potatoes layered over the onions. If you save the prettiest ones for the top, it might turn out prettier.
- Sprinkle pecans evenly over the top.
- In a small bowl, make a sauce by mixing the water, honey, mustard, rosemary, salt, pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
- Pour over top.
- Loosely cover dish with foil, and bake for 40 minutes.
- Remove foil, bake 15 minutes.
- Drizzle honey over the top, and bake 5 more minutes.
- Remove from oven, let sit for ~10 minutes, then ENJOY!
*For this test, I used only one package of pecans ~57g, but it would be more of a pecan crust with more pecans! And that is what I will do for the actual big day of cooking!
Hope you enjoyed this guest post!
An Allergy-free Whimsy 