eat your veggies: sweet potato "fries"

Yep, another sweet potato post.  But sweet potatoes are one of the few veggies my husband will eat, and our son pretty much loves them, so I try to use these whenever I can.  Here's a good recipe for oven-baked sweet potato fries that I use all the time.

The Ingredients.

2-3 sweet potatoes, depending on size (just eyeball it once you cut them up...if you think you need more, cut up another one!)
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Cinnamon to taste

The Method.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, and line a baking sheet with foil.  Spray the foil with nonstick spray and then set aside.  Wash sweet potatoes, and peel if desired; we usually leave the skin on, but it gets kind of tough in some places so kids may not like them this way.  I usually peel them for my son once he's about to eat them.

Then the business of cutting the sweet potatoes into fries...kind of a trial and error thing.  You have to work with the shape of the potato (long, skinny potatoes work best), and that means there's really no tried-and-true method for cutting them.  I usually just make sure my fries are about 1/4 inch thick, and two to three inches long.  You can make them thicker if you want, but they might take longer to bake or else just be mushy.

Anyway, once you have all the fries cut, put them in a bowl and drizzle them with the olive oil.  Add in the salt, pepper, and cinnamon, and then shake the bowl around till all the fries are coated.  Empty them out onto the baking sheet and spread them out until they're in a single layer.  Bake for 20 minutes, stir them around, and then bake for an additional 5-10 minutes, or until golden brown and crusty around the edges.  Be sure to watch them at this point; they seem to go from "golden brown" to "black" pretty quickly!  Let cool for a few minutes, and then serve with ketchup.

You can eat these without much guilt since they're sweet potatoes (which is basically the BEST vegetable for you out there), they require very little oil, and they're baked instead of fried.  I've come to prefer these to regular fries (unless you're talking about the waffle fries from Chick-Fil-A.  No comparison there).  I hope you like them!