My life these days is basically work, hike, Jeep tours, and physical therapy. I have an amazing physical therapist here in Big Bear Lake, California — truly, she’s a saint — but damn it, I want to be fixed. I’m tired of spending an hour a week being lasered like a broken iPhone. One thing is for damn sure, this flavorful Indian Sweet Potato Chaat is my Emotional Support Snack, because when life hands you bullshit, roast some sweet potatoes and beef tallow in your waffle maker!
A partially ruptured Achilles has been dragging me down (literally) for the last year, which is not ideal when your job description includes hiking ten to fifteen miles a day as a nature guide. Healing is hard when “rest” isn’t in your vocabulary.
So there I am on the PT table, ankle getting laser treatment, freshly showered, slathered in Sprouts’ finest natural deodorant less than an hour earlier, when I have the horrifying realization:
Why do I already smell like armpits?
All these years of Schmidt’s, Salt & Stone, and artisanal pit pastes better be worth it. I’ve been wearing natural deodorant for over ten years — which means for a full decade, I’ve basically just waved an organic lavender wand across my armpits and called it hygiene. (To be fair, no one who wears natural deodorant needs to brag. Anyone standing next to us already knows.)
I smelled aggressively not bougie. And listen — I’ve earned my somewhat natural scent. I realized something: I’ve made some deeply questionable sensory choices in the name of “memories.”
But here’s the part I don’t usually admit:
I didn’t switch to natural deodorant because it was trendy. I switched because somewhere along the way I read one alarming article at 1:00 a.m., fell into a wellness rabbit hole, and decided my armpits were the gateway to my long-term memory.
I have spent ten years smelling faintly botanical because I never want to forget my own name.
Bavarian Memories (And Aromas)
Like sleeping in a soaking wet tent in Munich during a monsoon for seven days just to chug beer in outdoor gardens and pretend I didn’t smell like mold and regret. Or inhaling roughly twenty Currywursts in one week like it was an Olympic sport.
Eau de DEET: A Love Letter to the Arctic
Or driving over 100 miles up the Dalton Highway to the Arctic Circle at midnight daylight, covered head to toe in mosquito bites, celebrating the Summer Solstice smelling like DEET or a haunted citronella candle. — just to experience the Land of the Midnight Sun. Totally worth it. I want to remember the truly remarkable adventures on the tundra when I am 90. And the first time I tried Reindeer Sausage and Sourdough Pancakes in Talkeetna, Alaska.
Back When I Hiked Like a Labrador on Espresso
Or hiking 20+ miles in a day to places like Thousand Island Lake and Minaret Lake in the High Sierra, back when my legs worked properly and my joints didn’t sound like bubble wrap. I don’t want to forget that wilderness. Or that version of me. Or the now-discontinued bacon jerky that fueled those summits.
Charged by Elephants, Powered by Dosas
Or southern India — elephants charging our Jeep, sleeping in treehouses, cows wandering the streets, dosas, bhajis, Indo-Chinese feasts night after night… and yes, that one time I hauled my butter-chicken-filled body onto a camel for social media content.
Have you noticed a pattern?
Yes — most of my precious memories involve food.
You can take the food blogger out of the mountains, but you cannot take away her emotional support snacks.
Life is too good to forget.
And that’s why, in our tiny mountain community here in this golf course named neighborhood that was once Big Bear Lake’s original Peter Pan Woodland Club Gold Course back in the 1920’s, we’re all a little stressed, a little forgetful, and a little more tired than we’d like to admit. Life on Birdie Boulevard has been stressful to say the least for the last year or more.
Some of us forget what day it is.
Some of us forget why we walked into the kitchen.
And some of us are full-time caregivers for neighbors with dementia — because that’s what small-town neighbors do.
We notice when our elderly neighbors don’t open their blinds.
We check on the Vietnam vet d
own the street.
We bring cookies even to the neighbors who still think Christmas is optional.
A handful of us neighbors here on Birdie Boulevard and I have been full-time caregivers for our beloved friend — and basically chosen family — Paul, for years now. Paul is a former Forest Service Head Recreation Officer, and if you’ve lived in Big Bear Lake anytime since 1979, you know exactly who he is. For two decades, he was everybody’s boss in local forestry. He’s a cornerstone of this community, and thankfully, he now has a small but mighty coalition of neighbors helping care for him as he navigates dementia.
When Paul’s memory issues became impossible to ignore two years ago, my boyfriend and I finally hauled him — kicking, fighting, and deeply in denial, like any good lifelong Democrat — to a neurologist an hour from home. We spent endless hours on the phone refusing to accept a “three months out” appointment and somehow secured a specialist visit the following week. That meant surviving a waiting room that felt straight out of Mumbai to see the wonderful Dr. Patel, who helped get Paul on medication that could at least slow the damage and give him some quality of life.
Parkinson’s and dementia are brutal diseases. I wouldn’t wish them on my w
orst enemy.
(Okay, that’s not entirely true. There are a few people from my fifteen years in the abominable grocery industry who might deserve a little karmic reflection. It may not be the most Christian thing to say, but I do my good Christian duty every day — and I’ve earned the occasional uncharitable thought.)
This is why I love living in a small town. We show up for each other. We notice when something’s wrong. We step in when family is far away or overwhelmed. Those kinds of quiet, human moments — the ones that don’t make headlines — feel increasingly rare these days. And yet, here they are, alive and well, right in our neighborhood.
Chelsea Clinton once said it takes a village.
She was wrong.
It takes a boulevard.
And sometimes it takes sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potato Chaat Boats: Comfort Food for Chaotic Times
So what do you eat when your morning has been too stressful for salads and too chaotic for restraint?
And when your brain is fried, your body is tired, your ankle is broken, and your nervous system is running Windows 95…
You need comfort food.
But make it functional.
Enter: sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potato Chaat: Because I Can’t Emotionally Handle Another Salad
Sweet potatoes are basically edible therapy. Brain food. Comfort food. Carbs with emotional stability. And for my perimenopausal brain fog? They’re doing the Lord’s work.
You had me at sweet potatoes.
And better yet — sweet potato chaat.
Are they delicious?
Chaat your beautiful face, of course they are.
Are they healthy?
Chaat up — you absolutely need more sweet potatoes in your life.
Waffled Sweet Potato Chaat Boats (Because Ovens Are So 2025)
I grew up in the 90s. Sweet potatoes were not part of our culture.
Fish sticks? Yes.
Tuna casserole? Obviously.
Sloppy Joes? Mandatory.
What flannel-wearing teenager in 1996 didn’t love a Sloppy Joe?
Now? I make sweet potato chaat boats in my waffle maker like a functional adult with seasoning preferences.
If it’s mid-January and your boyfriend is watching sportsball, what else are you supposed to do but invent an Indian-inspired sweet potato appetizer?
The day I learned you could make sweet potato waffle chaat boats in an actual waffle maker was life-changing.
Sweet Potato Chaat That Feels Responsible but Tastes Reckless
Here’s the truth Instagram won’t tell you:
You must keep the skins on.
Influencers with names like The Naughty Fork will tell you it’s easy to cook sweet potatoes in the waffle maker.
Those bitches lie.
If you peel the sweet potato, it will stick to your waffle maker like bad opinions stick to daytime television.
Keep the skins. Save your sanity.
RFK Jr. Approved, Plumber Feared
Beef tallow is hands-down one of the best fats you can cook with and I love it in this recipe. High smoke point. Incredible flavor. Crispy edges. Zero seed-oil sadness. I genuinely love cooking with it — especially for things like sweet potatoes and waffle iron chaos.
That said… beef tallow is also an absolute menace to clean up.
Yes, I listen to all of that Make America Healthy Again that RFK JR spews. It’s about damn time that a politician cares about what we put in our bodies. Yes, RFK Jr. occasionally pops up on Fox News and says things that make me nod while holding a wooden spoon. But no one warns you that beef tallow is a hard animal fat that solidifies into industrial-strength glue the second it hits room temperature.
Which is especially fun when it’s February, you’re in a mountain cabin, it’s actively blizzarding, and you’re trying to grease a waffle iron with a spoonful of tallow that has the consistency of a candle you could bludgeon a democratic relative with.
Important public service announcement:
Do not, under any circumstances, wash beef tallow down your sink.
In cold climates, it will harden inside your pipes faster than a political hot take on cable news. One minute you’re rinsing a waffle iron, the next you’re googling plumbers and questioning every life choice you’ve ever made.
In cold climates, that stuff hardens inside your pipes faster than a political hot take on cable news. One minute you’re casually rinsing a waffle iron, feeling domestic and accomplished. The next? You’re Googling emergency plumbers and revisiting every decision that led you to cook with rendered cow fat during a blizzard.
Yesterday, during 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts and sideways snow, we had the absolute joy of pressure-washing our own pipes. During a raging blizzard. Had we called a professional plumber, that little adventure would have cost a cool $500 — which, frankly, is an unacceptable amount of my thrift-store budget.
So instead, we:
- Terrified the pets.
- Let all the heat out of the cabin.
- Questioned our DIY confidence.
- And power-blasted our plumbing like two frozen idiots on a homesteading reality show.
The moral of the story?
Beef tallow: incredible in the pan.
Absolutely unhinged in the plumbing.
Indian Sweet Potato Chaat an Emotional Support Snack
2 teaspoons coconut oil
1 sweet potato, roasted in the oven for 1 hour, cooled
1/8 of a red onion, diced thin
1/4 cup mint chutney
3 teaspoons Date Tamarind Chutney (This is the best store-bought for IShopIndia or Make Your Own or beef tallow
3 teaspoons of your favorite Raita, I prefer Pomegranate or Peach Raita
Crispy Crunchies Indian Tidbits such as Sev and Papadi
Firstly, the sweet potato waffle boats. Oil your air fryer well. I like to use coconut oil but feel free to use avocado oil, ghee, beef tallow or even butter (No judgment here). I actually love these with beef tallow but it’s a bitch to clean out of my waffle iron.
When your waffle iron is hot, squish in your sweet potatoes. Season with coarse sea salt and press the top of the waffle iron closed. When your waffle iron dings to let you know it is done, open it up, remove your Sweet Potato Chaat Boat oh so carefully and layer on your toppings: The Mint Chutney, Raita, Date Chutney, red onion pieces, candied almonds and your Crunchy Tidbits
