Just Microwave Sweet Potatoes
Thanksgiving dinner isn’t the easiest one, so I’m always looking for ways to reduce both the stress and the effort involved in preparing it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to cook sweet potatoes (or yams) in the damn microwave. Unless you’re cooking fried sweet potatoes or any other diced, sliced, or diced sweet potato dish that aims to crisp or brown, there is no reason to waste the time and energy required to fry whole or even half sweet potatoes. into your oven.
Particularly when the microwave is right here and the result is exactly the same. The preparation is simple: just wash the sweet tubers and poke a few holes in them with a fork, then place them on a paper towel or microwave-safe plate and microwave for five minutes at full power, turning halfway up. Test the doneness by piercing each sweet potato with a peeling knife. If the blade slips easily, then it’s done. If the blade encounters any resistance at all, place it in the microwave for another minute. Repeat until the knife goes through the potatoes like butter. (Then eat it with butter.)
The more potatoes you have in the microwave, the longer it will take, but still not as long as cooking potatoes in the oven (which is at least 45 minutes, but usually an hour).
When the sweet potatoes (or yams) are tender, you can eat them as they are or with butter and salt, or you can peel the insides to make a sweet potato pie , some sort of mashed potatoes, or a sweet potato casserole. There’s really no reason to get the oven involved; I heard that the oven might be busy anyway.