Mama Nancy’s Sweet Potato Casserole

We all know what sweet potato casserole is: sweet potatoes with a puffy marshmallow topping, right? Well, as much as I love big white puffy puffs of sugar, I really have never been a fan of the sweet potato casserole made this way. I grew up with my mother’s sweet potato casserole. It’s SO sweet but SO delicious!

The ingredients, simple and sweet:  Canned sweet potatoes, butter, milk, sugar, vanilla and eggs.

Drain your sweet potatoes and dump them into a bowl. Mash the crap out of them!

Pour your milk into your bowl of mashed sweet potatoes

Pour in your melted butter. Don’t pee into your casserole.

Dump your sugar, vanilla (Vintage green Tupperware measuring spoons make this casserole taste especially special), two eggs and then mix it all up real nice-like. Mmm mmm good! Now set it aside and we’ll prepare the topping!

Topping Ingredients: Self rising flour, brown sugar, melted butter and chopped pecans

Dump your flour in a clear photogenic pyrex bowl

Dump in the pecans, brown sugar and melted butter in a slow delicate fashion so your husband can snap 3,000 photos to get JUST the right pour picture. Then mix it all up until it’s crumbly and delicious. Yes, I tasted the topping on it’s own. Yes it was delicious.

Pour the topping onto the casserole and smooth it out evenly. If you use a round casserole dish like I did, it’s going to seem like a THICK layer of topping, but it works out just fine. My mama has always made it in this dish, so it probably wouldn’t tasted near as good in any other dish.

Throw it in the oven. Well, don’t THROW it. Just set it in there gently. Unless you’re an angry cook. And you’re not using something breakable. And you don’t mind a big  mess. If that’s the case, go ahead and give it a nice throw.

Take it out of the oven when the topping is looking brown and toasty.

EAT IT. It might seem a little on the runny side when it first comes out. I recommend letting it sit for 15 minutes or so. And believe it or not, this recipe is actually still delicious heated up the next day. And the next day. And 3 days from then. Yum yum delicious!

Ingredients:

3 cans sweet potatos in syrup, drained & mashed
1/2 C milk
1 C sugar
2 eggs
1 T vanilla
1/4 C butter, melted

Topping Ingredients:

1 C chopped pecans
1 C brown sugar
1/2 C self-rising flour
1/3 C butter, melted

Pre-heat oven to 350°. Mix the main ingredients in a the casserole you plan to bake it in. Mix the topping ingredients in a small bowl and then spread evenly over the sweet potato mixture. Bake for 25-35 minutes, until topping is browned and toasty.

Candy

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Tiny Turkey Hands

My little boy is currently in a crafting/coloring frenzy phase.  Any time his sister isn’t around he breaks out his marker and asks for paper.  He loves creating little “projects” or “systems” as he sometimes calls them.  Many times during one of the two naps V still has during the day he and I will create something.  Whether it’s just plain coloring in a coloring book, creating a story, or making something for dessert he’s always a happy boy with the one on one attention and some sort of product to show his daddy when he gets home.

This week I decided to base our project off of something I did as a first grader.  So a LONG time ago I remember getting to make up my own stationary using our thumbprints to create little animals, I specifically remember making a pig.  I believe this stationary was then given to my mother as a mother’s day gift.  Anyway with all the turkey crafts out there that involve cutting which S really isn’t all that good at yet I thought this could be a cute way to make up some pictures and maybe make a card to send to the grandparents.

Well S had other ideas.

He decided he did NOT want to just use a thumbprint or a fingerprint.  What he really wanted was to do a handprint (probably because the last time we had the ink pads out we did handprints to mark 6 months for V and 3 years for S).  So I obliged and we have our craft to share:  Tiny Turkey Handprints.  Fingerprint turkeys will wait for another day.

Begin with gathering your supplies.  We used kid friendly ink pads purchased at JoAnn’s (I wish I had made another trip out before we did this craft to get brown and some other colors but we made due with black, pink, purple, and orange), cardstock, scissors, and markers/colored pencils/crayons.  Baby wipes or a wet paper towels are a handy thing to have too.

First decide what your project will be.  S wanted to make just pictures so I left the cardstock alone.  However this could easily be made into a card if you wanted to fold/cut the cardstock to the size you want.

For the ink, I stamped S’s hand first with the black on his thumb and palm.  Then we did each finger up as a colored feather.  First time we did it with each finger being a separate color.  The second time I started with the first segments of his fingers closest to his palm with one color, then the second segment with another color, and finished up with the tips of his fingers with the third color.  NOTE: If you are going to do multiple colors on the fingers I recommend NOT doing the thumb/palm until last AND starting with the lightest color and moving to the darkest as there may be transfer of ink between the pads as you ink up the hand.

Press hand firmly on to the cardstock.  Making sure your little one actually puts their palm all the way down too (ask me how I know this… we had a few turkeys that were just tail feathers).

Now that the hand print is done.  Quick clean up before you have handprints all over your house!  Love how clean these inks clean up!

Add an eye, a beak, and wattle (the red dangly thing).  You can also outline with a black marker to bring out the features.

For one of our pictures I added a background per what S asked for/told me the turkey was doing- he tried to tell me the turkey was eating some ham but then we talked about what turkeys eat so then he decided on seeds.  Then we added some of the things he was grateful for.  Insta-fridge material!

Gobble Gobble!
Viever

Wanted: Small Fries and a Cherry Coke!

Ok, maybe not a cherry coke, but if you have one…

This is Crystal and I’m putting this call out there to all of you culinary HEs & SHEs!  We need some of you to spotlight in our Small FRY-day posts for November and our theme is “Thanksgiving Nomming” (Well, THEY’RE calling it “Family Favorite Recipes”, but I like Nomming).  If you have a favorite fall recipe that you think would be the bomb diggity on the Thanksgiving table, we want to feature you!  Fill out the form here and let us know what recipe you’d like to share with us.  If we pick you, we’ll let you know all the deets (that’s details in the language of “awesome”) as far as due date and content.  We want to spotlight you and your kitchen couture…kitchen calamity…whatever!  Thanks for letting us show you off.

Nom Nom Nom,

Crystal

P.S. You do not HAVE to have a blog to contribute.  We want to hear from all of the lovely & creative folks out there!