Healthy Purple Sweet Potato Hash

So, after you’ve done all your Thanksgiving shopping, prepping, and cooking, you might end up with just a few extra sweet potatoes: the buffer in case there were any last minute additions to the Thanksgiving guest list. Now what? You don’t have enough for a second meal…or do you? This purple sweet potato breakfast hash feeds four and only needs the following: two sweet potatoes, one onion, one bunch of kale and two garlic cloves. Try this simple, healthy recipe for a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend brunch this month.

When shopping for these beautiful, local, purple-skinned sweet potatoes at our Farm Market here at Weaver’s I was surprised (and a little confused) when the sign read “sweet potatoes” instead of “yams.” Wait, I thought, aren’t yams orange-fleshed, and sweet potatoes white-fleshed?” After a little digging into our agriculture’s history, I finally found the answer to the discrepancy Americans have in naming this vegetable.

Simply put, “yams” is a misnomer for the sweet, orange potatoes so celebrated during this festive time of year. You rarely find real yams in grocery stores, because people import them from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean as a specialty item. The yam, a tropical tuber, has rough, brown, scaly skin and starchy, white flesh. Yams can grow 2-3 feet long, can weigh over 70 pounds, and store well for many months. Conversely, the sweet potato is an edible root from a different family that grows in the Americas and has a much shorter shelf life. Sweet potatoes themselves have different skin colors, flavors, and textures, and can have white, purple, yellow and orange flesh.

So, why all the confusion? Americans were long familiar with white, yellow and purple sweet potatoes, but it was only in the 1930’s that farmers began cultivating the orange-fleshed potato we know so well today. As a way to differentiate the white from the orange, grocers started advertising the two as sweet potatoes and yams, respectively. And that is really it! Generations later, many of us still adamantly call the same potato by its marketing name. If you’d like to learn more about this potato history, check out this Almanac article here. Whether your family calls them sweet potatoes or yams, these bright root veggies are easy to prepare, sweat to eat, and crazy-healthy for you. Stop by Weaver’s this week to pick up these local potatoes and all you need for your Thanksgiving dinner all in one shop! Please refer to our fall store hours here. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

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