Yams Gourmet Babylon Style

Thanksgiving Yams with Orange Cranberry Relish

What are your yam or sweet potato recipes for the holidays? Here is what I made. It was inspired by someone on Gourmet Babylon, a FB group a friend invited me to about a month ago. They have given me so many great ideas that I have neglected to blog. So I'm making up for it today with 2 entries. We will definitely be making this again.



Rinse 3 softball sized yams, poke with fork, and cook the yams in a microwave for 10 minutes. If you prefer you can bake them in the oven till mostly done. Then peel, slice, and layer in a baking dish with cranberry relish and walnuts. 
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Orange Cranberry Relish

Orange Cranberry Relish:
1 cup of fresh cranberries rinsed, strained, and placed in food processor with 1 sectioned orange, process briefly till pieces are the size you enjoy in your relish. Save the juice and peels. Place into an airtight container but do not cover yet, add 1/4 cup of coconut palm sugar or 1/8 cup of brown sugar, any extra juice from the orange you sectioned, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. You can double this recipe easily. Extras save well in the fridge and can be frozen. Chill for 2 hours before serving

Walnuts:
Chop and soak the walnuts for 2 hours before then strain, rinse and set aside to dry. I soaked the walnuts while our orange cranberry relish was chilling in the fridge. this lets the chemicals in the walnut that make it bitter release, hence the need to rinse them, and it makes them softer and need less cooking time as well, in fact you can just eat them raw at that point and your body could process the proteins.

First Layer of Yam Dish

Layer yams, rellish, walnuts, and then Sprinkle a small amount of red pepper flakes on each layer. Squeeze a full orange worth of juice over the entire thing. Place baking dish in the oven at 350 for 10 minutes. We then turned the oven off and left them sitting in there with the stuffing until we were ready to serve. SO GOOD! You could use 1/8th of a cup of brown sugar for the same level of sweetness if you do not have coconut palm sugar, but I decided to use up the last of mine for this. It is said to be low on the glycemic index, and I've found that cooking low glycemic foods keeps my blood sugar more regulated. Before eating dinner my BG was 104, and after eating my thanksgiving meal this year my blood glucose was only 126 a full two hours later! Woohoo! (2 hours later is when they tell me to check, supposedly it's the highest your blood sugar will get after eating)

If you use either of these recipes, please let me know how you liked them, and if you have your own favorite you'd like to share, please do! You can also join in the recipe sharing in the Healthy Recipe Sharing Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HealthyRecipeSharing/