Friday Group Ride #46

So there’s this yearly battle between my mother and my wife at Thanksgiving time over the sweet potatoes. My wife makes them. She follows a fairly typical recipe that involves lots of butter and brown sugar. The end product is cloyingly sweet and serves, I think, as an excellent counter point to mashed potatoes with gravy. My mother prefers a more esoteric preparation, hewing to her more savory conception of the Thanksgiving Day feast.

I love Thanksgiving, because it’s a food holiday. If you put food in front of me most any day of the year, I will probably eat it, but on Thanksgiving, like most Americans, I take that approach to an extreme. I will eat those sweet potatoes no matter how they’re prepared. I’ll even eat the ones with the marshmallows on top that gourmands turn their noses up at.

I have been known to eat half a pie on the day in question. And that’s only because people are watching. Otherwise, I’d eat more.

This week’s Group Ride is about food. Do you keep it together all season and then go off the rails, a la Jan Ullrich, once the weather turns cold and the wood smoke wafts in the breeze? Most of us go off the rails at some point, whether it’s through caloric debt (I make horrible food choices when I’m famished), or out of sheer boredom with the ascetic lifestyle we cleave to otherwise. Is there a food that, even when you go off the rails, you won’t eat?