Sweet Potato Fries (Baked)

The finished product

Fries. Mmm. The perfect salty snack with the perfect amount of crunch and warm soft goodness that’s awful for you. The little guilty pleasure that causes you to run the extra 10 minutes at the end of your daily jog. it’s a love hate relationship with fries.

So darn me for giving more reason to love fries. This recipe has a combination of great flavors that makes it hard for you to stop eating, even if the texture of the fries don’t come out perfect.

I tend to pick up quite a bit of sweet potatoes when they’re on sale so I just wash, peel and cut the whole batch and store them for later use. I find it’s really easy to bag portions into zippered sandwich bags so that we don’t make too much in one sitting and feel sad for each other later.

Ingredients:
Sweet potatoes (2-3 yams or about 1-11/2 cup of fries)
Olive oil
Salt
Sugar
Cayenne pepper (powdered and bottled and ready to use)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking tray with wax paper or parchment paper.
2. Wash and peel sweet potatoes
3. Cut sweet potatoes into fries by first cutting into disks and then into fries. Width and length of fries is really up to you. Mine are always a little shorter because I find it easier to to cut the sweet potato in half and go from there.
4. Coat fries with olive oil. Rule of thumb is to make sure all the fries are coated and that there’s no excess for our fries to swim in. So you can try just a bit first, stir around with a spoon and add some more if need be.
5. Season fries with salt, sugar, and cayenne pepper. Here’s my ground rule for seasoning, equal parts sugar and cayenne pepper because they balance each other out, and the potatoes are sweet already, so no need for too much. But then again, I like spicy foods and can take quite a bit of spice.  Just a dash of salt.
6. Dump fries onto baking sheet and spread the fries out into one even layer.
7. Bake for about 30 minutes in your pre-heated oven, stirring once halfway through the cooking time.

Enjoy!

Price breakdown:

Sweet Potatoes--~$1.20 ($0.39 a pound, bought 3 pounds)
Sugar--Free
Olive oil--$0.99 (bought this from the 99 cents store, it was a mix of canola, soy, and olive oil)
Cayenne pepper--$0.99 (also got this from the 99 cents store)
Salt--Free

Total (3 portions that’ll serve 1-3 persons each): $3.18