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This  Southwest Sweet Potato Casserole is unlike any you have tried before.  Gone are the marshmallows and sugars and in their place are tomatoes, cheese and spices.

I sent my husband to the grocery store.  That phrase by itself explains a lot of what comes next.  It’s always  fun to see what my husband buys when I send him to the store.  Often, when given a list of two or three things, he comes home with two or three bags full of extra items.  Once, I asked him to get 10 cans of diced tomatoes and I was lucky to get 1 can of tomatoes with chiles.

So, I sent him to the store to buy sweet potatoes.  We have recently moved to Washington state from Florida.  In Florida, sweet potatoes are orange fleshed tubers.  There are no other options.  Apparently, in Washington, they label those orange things “yams.”  If you buy “sweet potatoes,” you get white fleshed, less sweet, more fibrous mystery vegetables.   I had to spend a lot of time on the computer investigating before I understood what my husband had bought me.

It was a happy accident regardless.  I had planned this casserole, thinking I’d be using the soft, sweet, orange yams.  Instead, I used the white fleshed sweet potatoes and we absolutely LOVED it.  I am going to try it with the orange yams, just to see how it turns out.  I believe it will still be delicious, so don’t worry if you live in an area where sweet potatoes aren’t called yams.

The sweet potato I used was roughly the size of a regulation size football.  It took me a long time to peel and shred by hand.  I ended up with 8 cups of shredded potatoes.  This made a 9×13 pan of casserole.  You can serve it as a meatless main dish.  You can also halve the recipe if you don’t want as much.