But after watching the video, it seemed much too easy a dish to not make. The only ingredients I was missing were the few sweet potatoes, which were only $0.99 per pound at Stop & Shop. Everything else was already waiting in the cupboard. All you need, aside from the sweet potatoes, is a few tablespoons of olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and whatever other spices you'd like. (Amy uses cumin and paprika in hers. I used a little paprika as well, and it tasted phenomenal. But more on that later.)
Making these sweet potato fries is exactly as simple as the video makes it out to be (unlike a lot of cooking videos, you know, the ones where the chef seems to have made the food a million times and never makes any mistakes, and doesn't point out any of the problems you may run into). This recipe is virtually foolproof. That is, unless you were to interpret "a pinch of salt" as "a fistful of salt" or "two tablespoons of olive oil" as "a bucket of olive oil."
Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. While it's heating up, wash and peel however many potatoes you intend to use. I only used one because, although my boyfriend was making the fries with me, he isn't a sweet potato fan and wouldn't be eating any. However, because I have a huge love of sweet potatoes, I used a really big one. You cut your peeled potato(es) into fry-sized pieces and throw them into a bowl. Add two tablespoons of olive oil, a pinch of salt, a little pepper (use your own discretion here -- I'm not big on pepper, so I didn't use much), and whatever other spices you want to use. My boyfriend added a small amount of paprika too. Mix it all together so you don't just have a clump of spices on the top of your sliced potato pieces, and add some more olive oil. We used an additional tablespoon.
In Amy's video, she spreads her potato pieces over a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. We didn't have any parchment paper, so we just used tin foil. It works the same. You don't need to spray it with Pam or anything because there's already olive oil on the potatoes. Spread them out evenly and put the whole thing in the oven for 15 minutes. Pull it out, flip them over, and put them back in the oven for 10 more minutes. We cut our potatoes into small pieces because I wanted them to be a bit more crispy. The only thing I would modify about the way we made these fries would be to bake them for a few minutes longer to add some more crispiness.
These fries were completely perfect. They came out of the oven, I piled them on a plate, and about halfway through an episode of "The X-Files," they were gone. Aside from the crisp level (they were pretty crispy already, but I could have gone for a little more), I would not have changed anything. No dip or additional spice would have added to them. For me, that is. Try it yourself and taste the amazement.
Problems I ran into
None. Seriously. Well, I did blow a fuse (twice), but that's just because the fuse box gets angry when I have the air conditioner and the oven on at the same time.
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