Sugary Brown Sweet Potatoes

I was inspired to cook these sweet potatoes by an interview of Teri Hatcher in Prevention magazine. The question posed was: "Do you have a go-to healthy recipe?" Her reply was, "Here's something that people die for in my house: Put olive oil, onion, and garlic into a cast-iron skillet and cook until it's almost sugary brown. Then I'll add chopped sweet potatoes and cook until they get crusty."

I did exactly what Teri said to do

and here is my documentation:

First, I chopped both a white and a red onion and put them in olive oil (enough to just coat the bottom of  skillet). You can see things starting to cook:

Next, I chopped up some garlic cloves. This shows how many I used:

Here is the garlic added to the already cooking onions. See how nicely everything is browning up?

Next, I chopped the sweet potatoes. These are organic from Whole Foods Market. If you haven't noticed, yams are different from sweet potatoes. These are more yellow and not nearly as sweet as a yam.

Once the onions and garlic had gotten nice and brown, I put the sweet potatoes in the skillet. You will need to stay with this and keep it stirred up really well. Towards the end, you might want to add the lid in order to get those potatoes nice and soft.

Finally, here is the finished product. I apologize that I did not serve this in a quaint vintage pottery bowl. Spooning straight from the skillet saved on clean up and was environmentally friendly. Good excuse!

I know you are waiting for this so here goes:

The health benefits of sweet potatoes, compliments of Chef MD page 60:

• source of Vitamin A, C, B6, potassium, iron, manganese, and dietary fiber
• high in antioxidants
• helps to keep liver healthy
• helps stabilize blood sugar levels

Health benefits of garlic page 76:

• source of manganese, Vitamin B6, C, B1, protein, selenium, calcium, potassium, and iron
• protects from colon, breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer
• antibacterial
• for best results, allow garlic to "stand" for 10 minutes before heating

Health benefits of onion page 58-59:

• source of Vitamin C, B6, folate, potassium, dietary fiber
• helps reduce risk of mouth, throat, colon, breast, ovarian, and prostate cancer
• note: red onions have more flavonoids and pink shallots have greatest antioxidant activity of onions

I hope you are able to duplicate this meal in your kitchen. If I can do it, anyone can. Eating healthy is not difficult. Plan ahead. Move ahead. Live ahead of the free radicals! M