~As kids, we were told to eat our vegetables. One of those vegetables I was told to eat were sweet potatoes. The other one was green beans, but that’ll be for another post entirely. I was never a fan of sweet potatoes growing up, not only because they were orange, but also because I thought they had a weird stringy texture.
I can recall back to when I was about 11 or 12 years old, the family’s sitting around the table for dinner. My mother, bless her heart, tried with all her might to get me to try a sweet potato, but my defiant preteen self was dead set on not eating it. My mom even tried paying me to take a “no thank you” bite! A shiny quarter later, I reluctantly put the sweet potato in my mouth. It was just as I imagined: it had a strange tasty with that peculiar stringy texture.
As I got a little older, I stayed away from sweet potatoes as much as I could. When autumn rolled around every market was selling them! Around the holidays, my aunt makes a giant pan of whole roasted sweet potatoes every Thanksgiving. But now? Not as bad as I thought, but I’m one of those weirdos that only eat some foods in a certain preparation. I’ll only eat them fried (either as chips or fries) and mashed. I’ve had sweet potato fries in restaurants a couple of times, and I’m pleased with the crunchy/creamy taste combo. I tried mashed sweet potatoes for the frist time at Mariano’s. They have a hot foods bar where you can get a variety of entrées and sides for like $7 a pound. One day after yoga, I went there and scanned the bar.
And there they were: mashed sweet potatoes with maple sugar. I did a few laps around the bar before finally deciding on the smallest bit of sweet potato mash to put on my plate. To be perfectly honest, I braced myself before taking a bite. And to my great surprise, it was good! Not as creamy and delicious as regular mashed potatoes however.
So sweet potatoes aren’t so bad after all. Still not a giant fan of them, but now they’re at least tolerable.
The Garden Goddess 