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One Sweet Potato, Two Sweet Potato

© Bob Ewing

The next time you get together with family or friends for a meal, especially one in a restaurant, where people can make choices, watch what people order. This is not going to give you deep insights into the person, at least not neccessarily, but, if you do want to know more about them, it may give you an opening.

For example, when I first meet my brother-in-law, I noticed that he only ate meat with a small potato and sometimes, an even smaller, garden salad. Over the years we had a number of opportunites to dine out together. It soon became evident that he was a fast food fan big time.

I am a vegetarian, so picking a mutually compatible place for us to eat was sometimes a problem. So one day I asked him why he didn't eat more vegetables. He said as a child he was forced to eat anything that was put on his plate and this meant eating things that he didn't like, even after they got cold. He vowed that when he became an adult he'd only eat the things that he liked and he liked franchise burgers and fries.

The point to all this is that our relationship with food is a very personal and intimate one.

I know my realtionship with food is deep and personal. I enjoy eating. I also enjoying preparing and purchasing food. It is all related. This week I want to focus on another of my favourite foods, the sweet potato. Now my enjoyment of sweet potatoes does not compare to my passion, almost obsession, with peanut butter, but as a popular food, it does rank fairly high, especially during Thanskgiving.

My favourite ways to eat sweet potatoes is as an ingredient in a stir fry with onions, celery,and green and red pepper; dice all the ingredients, get the oil in your wok good and hot, add the ingredients. Stir for five minutes. Add to steamed rice with a little soy or hot sauce to make this a fun feed. I also enjoy them baked with a dab of butter or sweet potatoe pie.

Unlike peanut butter, you can grow your own, if you live in the appropriate climatic region. Like peanut butter, the sweet potato has links to George Washington Carver. Craver's use of sweet potatoes to rejuvenate the soil depleted by cotton served to increase their popularity as a food crop.

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