question about shopping for sweet potatoes

[RCB]

I need some help in selecting sweet potatoes at the store. This Christmas dinner, I tried a recipe that called for sliced garnet sweet potatoes, microwaved until soft and then baked with craisins and apricots and other good stuff. Some of the sweet potatoes 'waved nicely: becoming soft and a nice golden orange color. Other sweet potatoes were tougher, more fibrous and had a brown ring about a half inch in from the exterior. They also had brown spots that extended far into the potato.

My only guess was that some of the potatoes were old. I made an emergency trip back to the market to get some replacements, carefully picking those that looked young and unbruised. After taking these home and 'waving them, I had the same result: some perfect, mixed with some discolored. Any idea how come?

[mommywannabe]

Hmmm...I'm not a sweet potato expert by any means, but I would suspect that it may not be the taters, but rather how many you tried to nuke at once. I did some for Christmas, too, in my half-sized micro and didn't have any problems...only cooked two at a time.