It’s good I’m not a commercial grower.   While my vegetables always taste great, they sometimes lack in the looks department. A child of the 70s, I couldn’t keep this out of my head when I compared one of my sweet potatoes to some I bought at the store:

I baked all 4 together at 425 for about an hour.  I had to take a cleaver to mine before baking because it was so much thicker in the middle and would have cooked way slower than the others.

I did a taste-test and really couldn’t tell a difference, except that mine was a smidge less sweet.  I wonder if that’s because I’d harvested mine last September and the sugars had broken down while it was stored in the basement over the winter?

It also passed toddler taste-test too.  My older boy said “this rocks!”  Well, he says that for just about anything that has melted butter on it, so maybe that’s not a totally objective critique….but hey, he ate a vegetable! (We’re going through a phase right now….)

Here’s Mr. Hooper and a funkier version of the tune: