Why There's a Timer on the Oven, or My Recipe for Incinerated Sweet Potatoes

I've just been so hungry for baked sweet potatoes, that healthy, complex carbohydrate that, with a sprinkle of cinnamon, can taste like dessert. So when I got home yesterday, I pulled three out of my grocery bag, washed them and set them neatly on aluminum foil in my preheated 375 degree oven, closed the door, checked the time and dreamt of a really yummy side dish for my pork tenderloin that I was making for supper.

I got busy doing the usual multi-tasking: laundry, sweeping the floor, going through the mail, etc., and then started cleaning greens and doing some "prep ahead" work to save me time later.

Just then the phone rang, and it was another personal chef friend with whom I hadn't spoken in a couple of weeks, so I grabbed my cup of coffee and went out to the sunroom. We chatted for about an hour. (And it was delightful catching up!)

The dryer buzzed and so my attention was on the laundry for I-don't-know-how-long, and then I grabbed a bowl of cucmber peelings and tomato cores off the kitchen counter and headed out the door to find a new spot for a compost pile. I'm not going to go into all the distractions I found outside, but it was kinda like the old Family Circus cartoon from the Sunday paper, where little Billy's footprints are visible doing circles and loopty-loops all over the back yard tracing his path to do just one simple thing.

Ok, so back into the house I go and the phone rings again...this time it's my husband and I wander into the dining room while chatting with him....and I smell something burning. But it's so hard to identify! I walk from the dining room to the sunroom to the kitchen and back, and the dining room is the only place where I smell something burning. Thinking maybe it was electrical, I proceeded to unplug every lamp cord and sniff the outlet. Nothing! Weird.

So, I grabbed up the laundry basket and headed back through the kitchen to carry the clean towels to the bathroom, and came up short as I passed the wall ovens and felt the heat from them on my arm! It came to me in a flash! OMG! The sweet potatoes! They had been in the oven for 4 hours! (They may look nice and plump in the photo, but they were empty shells.)

So, there you have it, my method for making incinerated sweet potatoes.

Bon Appétit!
Chef Debbie