Someone had given me a few sweet potatoes; I intended to bake them, but hadn’t gotten around to it. I don’t know how long they keep and I was afraid they were going to go bad.

Then, this weekend, I saw Ingrid Hoffman on the Food Network make
this recipe for a savory oven-baked sweet potato french fry, with a chili pepper and paprika-based seasoning. It looked and sounded delicious.

Well, I tried it today — with a couple of changes. I did not have any coriander, but I added cumin, which I think always goes well with chili powder, as well as some onion powder. I used kosher salt instead of the rock salt she called for. I also probably used a larger quantity of seasoning than Ingrid did (I didn’t measure that carefully), resulting in a much heavier crusting of seasoning. (On one or two of the fries, the seasoning burned a little bit.)

Also, I didn’t have the ingredients for the avocado dip which she used to accompany the fries; I tried mixing mayonnaise and salsa, which gave me a surprisingly tasty dip.

But even with my tinkering, these turned out deeeelicious. Sweet potatoes are nutrition powerhouses, which makes me feel a tiny bit less guilty about the mayo in the dip.