With summer right around the corner and the idea of rocking my one piece haunting me I have decided to rework some of my favorite summer side dishes.  Something we eat a lot of in the summer is french fries.  We grill A LOT.  When I say a lot I mean almost every night.  We even have dinners where we will try to challenge ourselves to have every course of the meal on the grill.  Nat makes a to die for grilled Caesar salad that I will beg her to post soon!  French fries become a common side for burgers or brisket and it helps to be able to reduce the calories slightly.

Baked sweet potato fries are by no means reinventing the wheel and I’m sure you all have eaten them a million times but have you ever cooked them?  It is super easy and really hard to screw up so you should definitely try this soon!

Ingredients:

This recipe makes enough for 4 sides of fries.  General rule is 1 large potato for 2 people.

2 sweet potatoes

1 tsp. garlic powder

1/2 tsp. black pepper

2 tbs. oil

1/2 tsp. salt

Take your sweet potatoes and wash them, pat them dry, and begin to rough cut the potatoes into french fries.  Since sweet potatoes are so irregular in shape always think about cutting the potato with the flat side on the cutting board.  Cut the the potato length wise and place the flat side down.  Continue to cut into fries flipping the potato around as necessary to make it easier to cut.  Put all of the fries into a gallon size bag and pour in the oil, garlic, salt and pepper in the bag.  I prefer to use Garlic powder over fresh garlic in this instance because it coats a little more thoroughly.  Fresh garlic tends to stick together a little to much.   Shake the bag up so that the sweet potatoes are covered.  Pour the contents onto a baking dish and separate the fries as mush as possible.  Bake on 400 for about 8 to 10 minutes.  Feel free to check on them throughout to make sure you don’t over cook them.  I like mine a little on the mushy side so I keep them in for the full 10.  You can always add a little seasoning after they are done cooking if necessary.  See, french fries are healthy!

A neat way to serve these for a party or as appetizers is to roll up pretty card stock paper or newspaper into cones like in my mood shot.  It is an easy way to carry them around and snack on or to lay them on your plate.  Just roll into a cone and staple them shut.  I have also used this technique for individual popcorn and for chicken salad.  It is very cute and very versatile.

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