Healthy Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Today's Recipe
If you don't know what to serve for dinner tonight ...
The spice mixture and orange juice in this recipe adds a wonderful complement to the flavor of the sweet potatoes for a great new addition to your Healthiest Way of Eating. It also contains only 98 calories. Enjoy!

Healthy Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Prep and Cook Time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:

• 2 medium-sized sweet potatoes or yams, sliced thin for quick cooking
• 2 TBS fresh orange juice
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1 TBS extra virgin olive oil
• salt and white pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Bring lightly salted water to a boil in a steamer with a tight fitting lid.
2. Steam peeled and sliced sweet potatoes in steamer basket, covered, for about 10 minutes, or until tender
3. When tender, mash with potato masher, adding rest of ingredients.

Serves 4 Printer Friendly Version of Healthy Mashed Sweet Potatoes
In-Depth Nutritional Profile for Healthy Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Healthy Food Tip
The yellow mustard I buy says it has 0 calories. Will it still add up calories in the long run?

No natural food, with the exception of water, has 0 calories. There are some circumstances when you might see the Nutrition Facts Panel on a pre-packaged food indicating "0" calories per serving, but this "0" can be misleading. The Food and Drug Administration allows each company to determine what it will call a "serving size" for each of its products, and whenever a product's serving size contains less than five calories, the company is allowed to label it as "Calorie Free."
Admittedly, we're talking about a very small number of calories here. A teaspoon of prepared yellow mustard (like you'd find in a take-out packet) actually contains about three calories but is legally allowed to be labeled as "Calorie Free." If you had one teaspoon per day you'd end up with about 21 calories per week. That's the amount your body would burn off in about four to five minutes of walking. While it wouldn't make sense to just ignore this amount of calories, most people would be able to balance out their day in a way that made this amount completely non-problematic.
Mustard seeds themselves are a highly nourishing and healthy food. But the quality of any packaged food-like the yellow mustard you squeeze out of a bottle-depends on the quality and balance of the ingredients that it includes. Some spread-on mustards, for example, contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Once again the amount here is small, but I would not consider HFCS to be a healthy ingredient because it adds simple sugars without the necessary supporting nutrients. I would recommend an organic mustard in which the seeds have been stone ground and where the ingredient list contains natural substances like vinegar, honey, or natural spices but omits substances like HFCS. In the case of a high-quality mustard like the one described above, I believe you'd actually be making a helpful addition to your nourishment at a very minimal calorie cost.