To make soy hot dogs palatable, you need tasty toppings (chili or sauerkraut), plenty of condiments (relish, ketchup and mustard) and a good side dish (some sort of potato).  This is all necessary to mask the fact that you’re eating… a soy dog.

Soy sausages, however, are not so bad.  Every once in a while I buy the Trader Joe’s “Italian Sausage-less Sausage” and top them with grilled peppers and onions; if I concentrate hard enough, I can almost imagine I’m eating an honest-to-goodness Italian sausage, like the ones outside of Fenway Park.

But you still need a good side dish. Usually I’ll do something like sweet potato fries, but then I came across a recipe for “Sizzling sweet potato skins,” and that sounded much more interesting.

Here’s the original recipe from ZestyCook.com.  I changed a few ingredients in my version, including substituting skim milk for buttermilk, and using yams instead of sweet potatoes.

2 yams
1 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper
1/2 cup skim milk
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 cup cheddar cheese
2 slices of turkey bacon, cooked and crumbled
scallions for garnish

Set the oven to 400, rub the yams with olive oil, salt and pepper, and bake them for at least 45 minutes.  These yams were so enormous that they took more like 55 minutes to soften, and even then they could have used more time.

Split each yam lengthwise, scoop out the flesh, and mash it in a bowl with the milk, nutmeg and paprika.  Then stuff the mixture back inside each yam half, and bake for another 15 minutes.

I added the cheese and put them back in the oven until the cheese melted.

Garnish with the crumbled turkey bacon and scallions (and sour cream if you like).

This recipe is a great way to change up the way you eat sweet potatoes and yams. It’d make a nice party dish too.

Sausage-less sausage and baked stuffed yams — turned out to be a pretty good dinner.