Maple Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Last weeks Sunday Night Prep to Eat Clean All Week post has been a popular blog all week.  In that post I mentioned I don’t do much meal planning, so I’m trying to improve.  This week I made it my mission to plan a little more for the week, and find a way to make meals easy and quick using just a few ingredients.  Sweet potatoes made it easy for me!  I love roasted sweet potatoes, they are so simple to make, healthy, quick, and my kids love them.  All big pluses in my house!

My girls haven’t always loved sweet potatoes.  We’ve tried baked sweet potatoes, sweet potato fries, even sweet potato casserole at the holidays, but no luck with the little one’s.  Really?  You’ll eat kale and quinoa but you will not touch a sweet potato?  Kids.  I’m trying to eat more of them since sweet potatoes are excellent fuel for runners.  They are a great source of vitamin E, potassium, manganese, and complex carbs; all are important to refuel and recover after long runs.  So I tried roasting sweet potatoes with maple syrup, olive oil, salt, and a dash of cayenne.  So, amazingly delicious and simple, and the girls ate them!  Of course, I didn’t tell them they were sweet potatoes, they were a new veggie at the store and I heard it was delicious.  ;)

This week I decided to make extra and use the left over roasted potatoes in other recipes.  It only took five extra minutes to peel and chop the extra potatoes for me to have a great base for two other dishes — Sweet Potato Veggie Burger and Sweet Potato Peach Muffins.  Those recipes will be shared later in the week.  This recipe will make about 8 servings but it was the perfect amount to use the roasted sweet potatoes as a side dish, and have enough left over to make 4 burgers, and 12 muffins.

I started with six sweet potatoes that I peeled and chopped into about 1″ cubes.  I added them all to a large mixing bowl and let the little one’s get their hands dirty by helping me coat the sweet potatoes in the maple and olive oil mixture.  Then we spread them out in a single layer on two sheet pans.

In the oven they went.  Half way through cooking, I took them out of the oven stirred them and put them back in.  After about 40 minutes we had lots of great roasted sweet potatoes that will be used three ways!

Since I was using these in so many different recipes, I left the cayenne out when I was roasting them.  This would be an easy recipe for you to try different flavors — cinnamon, lemon, and orange for something sweet, or cayenne, or seasoning salt for something savory.  You can always add these after you roast them so you can each have the flavor you desire.