From the kitchen: baked sweet potatoes

  You can microwave a sweet potato, but it will taste a lot better if you bake it.  That's what a friend told us after we served him our baked sweet potatoes for dinner, and sent him home with some extra baked ones to eat later.
  I have multiple sweet potato cookbooks from the library right now, and after I try a few recipes from them, I'm pretty sure I'll hear what I always hear when I try a new sweet potato dish, "You can make that if you want, but they taste better if you just bake them."  Of course, I'm not including slicing potatoes into chips and deep frying them in lard.  And sweet potato pies are popular, too.  And everyone likes sweet potato biscuits every couple weeks, but our family can eat simple baked sweet potatoes multiple times per week and not grow tired, especially by rotating through the different varieties with all the different tastes, textures and colors.
  It doesn't seem quite right that such an easy preparation can be so good.  Just put the washed sweet potatoes directly on the oven rack and bake at 425 for about an hour.  That's it.