Prue's Hasselback Sweet Potatoes with Garlic Sage Butter

Prue’s Hasselback Sweet Potatoes with Garlic Sage Butter

Prue Leith

Featuring:

Sweet potatoes

Effort:

Complexity:

Cost:

Serves: 4

Prep time: 5 mins

Cook time: 1 hr

Ingredients:

butter

garlic

fresh sage

salt & pepper

sweet potatoes

Photo from Ant Duncan. Recipe kindly donated by Prue Leith from ‘Life’s too short to Stuff a Mushroom’.

Potato, garlic and sage are a trio made in heaven. And the hasselback treatment (invented by a restaurateur in Sweden in the 1940s) is fun to do, looks great and allows the flavourings to penetrate the potato. You can replace the butter with oil-based mixtures, like pesto or oil-and balsamic glaze. This version uses sweet potatoes, but of course you can make hasselbacks with any spud at all.

Method:

Heat the oven to 220°C/200°C fan/425°F/Gas 7 and line a baking sheet with baking parchment.

In a small mixing bowl, combine the melted butter, garlic and sage and season with salt and pepper. Stir well.

Using the hack, cut fine slits in the sweet potatoes to give them the hasselback treatment.

Brush the butter mixture generously over each sweet potato, making sure to get the mixture in between the cuts.

Place the sweet potatoes in a baking tray and bake for 50–60 minutes, or until they are tender and the edges are crispy.

Remove the sweet potatoes from the oven and serve.

AIR FRY: These work well in an air fryer – they take 30 minutes on the roast setting.

Engaging Kids

Kids who engage regularly with veg through veg-themed activities, such as arts and crafts, sensory experiences, growing and cooking are shown to be more likely to eat the veg they engage with. Encouraging kids to engage and play with veg is the handy first step to them developing a good relationship with veg and life-long healthy eating.

Kids in the kitchen

The eventual aim, if possible, is to get kids in the kitchen. Don’t worry, this doesn’t have to mean they are with you from start-to-end creating mess and rising stress levels! It can be as simple as giving them one small job (stirring, measuring, pouring, grating, chopping…) ideally involving veg. They can come in to do their little bit, and have fun with you for a few minutes. Getting them involved, making it playful and praising them plenty for their involvement, perhaps even serving it as dinner they “made”, makes it much more likely they will eat the food offered, not to mention teaching them important life skills. Find ideas, safety tips, videos and even a free chart in our Kids in the Kitchen section here.

Activities

While getting kids to interact with veggies for real and using their senses to explore them is best, encouraging hands off activities like arts & crafts, puzzles & games or at-home science experiments can be a great start, particularly for those who are fussier eaters or struggle with anything too sensory. Use these veg-themed activities as a stepping stone to interacting with the veg themselves. We have loads of crafty downloads here, puzzles here, and quirky science with veg here.

Sensory

Once you feel your child is ready to engage a little more, you can show them how to explore the veg you have on hand with their senses, coming up with playful silly descriptions of how a veg smells, feels, looks, sounds and perhaps even tastes. Find ideas, videos and some simple sensory education session ideas to get you started here.

Serving

The moments before food is offered can be a perfect opportunity for engagement that can help make it more likely a child will eat it! Giving children a sense of ownership in the meal can make a big difference to their feelings going into it and the pride they take in it. You know your child best, but if you aren’t sure where to start, we have some fun and simple ideas for easy roles you can give them in the serving process over here.