Don’t Throw Away Those Sweet Potato Peels

One of my biggest pet peeves is throwing away food. I could kick myself every time I dump food down the drain or in the trash: it’s just a complete and total waste! And I hate waste. Which is why I am so thrilled to link up to The Frugal Girl on her weekly feature where she posts a picture of all the food she had to throw away for the week, and invites other bloggers to do the same. The idea is to feel some accountability - who wants to admit they threw away all that money to the whole world? - to help you avoid throwing away food in the future.

So in the picture above, you see what I threw away this week:

1. a child’s serving of chicken
2. cucumber-tomato salad
3. (not pictured) 3-4 soft potatoes

The chicken is leftovers from going out to eat with our extended family to celebrate some birthdays. I tried 3 different times to get both kids to eat their leftovers, but they categorically refused. By then, it was time to throw them away. Sadness.

I made myself the cucumber-tomato salad, ate half of it, then forgot about the other half. Oops.

And the potatoes went bad surprisingly quickly! I’m going to half to cook up the rest of the bag for dinner tonight before they go bad, too.

You’re probably wondering about the sweet potato peels, aren’t you? I have not recently thrown away any sweet potato peels. In fact, I’ve discovered recently that sweet potato peels actually make an amazingly delicious little snack that’s good for you, too. Considering it’s made from something most people would grind in the garbage disposal, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal!

Now if you Google “sweet potato peels”, you’ll find a bunch of tutorials that instruct you to bake the sweet potato whole, scoop out the flesh, and then roast the peels. That’s great if you actually need sweet potato puree, but not so great if you’re wanting to peel and cut the sweet potatoes for some other purpose (like sweet potato fries, for example). In that case, you’re starting with raw peels, a totally different thing altogether.

I couldn’t find a single recipe online that started with raw sweet potato peels, so I invented my own. And Oh. My. Goodness. They were soooooooo good. Even better (in my humble opinion) than the variety that starts with baked potato peels. Instead of baking the peels, I boiled them a little bit first so they weren’t completely raw when I put them in the oven. The olive oil just soaked into the tender peels and created a crisp but tender salty little treat that was rather addictive.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the finished product, but trust me. These are good!

Boiling the peels adds an extra step, so these aren’t the QUICKest snack in my repertoire. But they’re still done in half an hour or less.

Very EASY! No special skills required.

Oh yeah, these are CHEAP. Can’t get any cheaper than this!

And very HEALTHY, too. The fiber from the peels and all the antioxidants and other goodness from the sweet potato is just the icing on this cake.

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