Just Microwave Your Sweet Potatoes

Thanksgiving dinner is not the easiest, so I’m always looking for ways to decrease both the stress felt and the effort exerted in its preparation. One of the easiest ways to do this is to cook your sweet potatoes (or yams) in the dang microwave. Unless you are making sweet potatoes fries or some other dish of diced, sliced, or chopped sweet potatoes where the goal is crispiness or browning, there is no reason to waste the time and energy required to roast whole — or even halved — sweet potatoes in your oven.

Particularly when the microwave is right there and the outcome is exactly the same. The prep is easy: Just wash your sweet tubers and poke a bunch of holes in them with a fork, then place them on a paper towel or microwave-safe plate and microwave them for five minutes at full power, turning halfway through the cook. Check for doneness by poking each sweet potato with a paring knife. If the blade slides through with ease, they’re done. If the blade meets any resistance at all, microwave them for another minute. Repeat until the knife moves through the potato like butter. (Then eat it with butter.)

The more potatoes you have in the microwave, the longer this will take, but it still won’t take anywhere near as long as cooking them in the oven (which is at least 45 minutes, but usually an hour).

Once the sweet potatoes (or yams) are tender, you can eat them as-is or with butter and salt, or you can scrape out their insides to make sweet potato pie, some sort of mash, or sweet potato casserole. There really is no reason to get the oven involved; I hear the oven may be otherwise occupied anyway.