I’m not much of a meal prepper. I envy my colleagues who come to the office with Tupperware in their totes, filled with a portion of the stew or dense bean salad that they made over the weekend. Meanwhile, I usually find myself spending $15 a day on some variation of fast-casual bowl slop. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t find the time or motivation to prepare a week’s worth of lunches all at once.
But one viral food trend — a simple combination of sweet potato and cheese created by budding food influencer Courtney Cook Bales (
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) — has shown me that a pre-packed lunch doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can require almost no time-consuming meal prep at all.
Courtney Cook Bales is a Georgia-based teacher, mother of four, and relatively new content creator. She started posting videos on TikTok last May, showing off her easy dinners and “teacher lunches,” which typically involve a combination of raw and cooked ingredients that she can store in her classroom’s mini fridge. “Honestly, when it comes to my lunch, I just like to piece things together,” she
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in one of her first videos.
As a teacher of British literature, many of Cook Bales’ creations are inspired by English culture and cuisine. She makes
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— a popular British cereal — with vanilla yogurt and chocolate shavings for breakfast,
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for dessert, and a
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every week for her family, featuring plates piled high with baked ham, mushy peas, roasted potatoes, and Yorkshire puddings.
One of her first few viral meals featured a take on the classic ploughman’s luncha traditional British platter with bread, cheese, and pickles. She enjoys the simple spread often, and on any given day,
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might contain boiled potatoes, a slice of pork pie, Scotch eggs, and Branston pickle, a sweet and tangy relish made from a variety of diced vegetables in a spiced sauce.
Beyond British cuisine, Cook Bales regularly dines on onion boils, lasagna, dumplings, and Korean army base stew; many of these dishes are scooped up and devoured with her vehicle of choice, the raw, curved petals of a sweet onion, which she calls “onion cups.”
Cook Bales’ videos are a breath of fresh air. She eats with joy and ease, making all of her dishes look that much delicious. With every bite the teacher takes, it’s clear how much she appreciates food. This visible joy that feels so accessible is exactly why some of her most simple lunches, like a sweet potato stuffed with cheese, have been replicated by thousands of other home cooks.
Cook Bales’ beloved lunch of sweet potato and cheese is as uncomplicated as it sounds. It is, with no other fuss or fanfare, a baked sweet potato that is stuffed with cheese. Like all of her meals, she doesn’t have any hard and fast guidelines for how to make it, but she usually prefers to slow-roast her sweet potatoes for one hour and 20 minutes at 300°F, then turn the heat off and let the tuber cool in the oven for three hours, its caramelized sugars developing an almost syrupy texture.
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There’s only one step needed to assemble this lunch once the sweet potato has been cooked. After pulling the skin off the top of the spud, Cook Bales holds the potato upright in one hand and pushes a large, rectangular piece of cheese down into the center of the potato before taking a bite of the simple creation.
Besides some type of sweet potato with a thick ribbon of cheese that’s been stuffed inside, all the components of this lunch can vary. Sometimes she uses a white Japanese sweet potato, and on other occasions she uses the Garnet variety with its classic orange hue.
Cook Bales occasionally opts for cheddar, but her favorite choice for this meal is Butterkäse, a German cheese that she has described as “if Velveeta and American cheese had a baby.” She tops it with giardiniera, macaroni salad, potato salad, or pickles, or just eats them straight. When it comes to the cheese-stuffed sweet potato, there are no rules.
After weeks of watching people try Cook Bales’ sweet potato method on TikTok, I had to give it a whirl. I bought two sweet potatoes — one Garnet and one Japanese. I unfortunately couldn’t find Butterkäse, so I picked up some similarly melty and mild Havarti instead.
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I prefer softer sweet potatoes, so I roasted mine at 425°F for just over an hour, then let them cool for 45 minutes. Then it was time to stuff. The tip of the Japanese sweet potato was easy to break open. I pushed a few pieces of Havarti through, filling it with as much cheese as the potato could hold before losing its shape. Finally, I took a bite.
And… it tasted like a sweet potato with cheese. Judging by the way Cook Bales and so many other content creators react while eating this meal — rolling their eyes and making sounds that indicate it’s outrageously delicious — I was expecting aRatatouille-style moment where two unexpected ingredients come together in harmony to create an entirely new flavor experience. But really, this just tasted like a sweet potato stuffed with cheese.
I added a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt, which helped balance out the sweetness of the potato, but the flavor of the cheese was still a bit lost, even though I putto yourof cheese inside. I kept going, topping different bites with kimchi, then sauerkraut, waiting for that aha moment to hit.
I moved on to the Garnet and decided to try it with a sharp Gouda instead. This was a massive improvement; the salty, yeasty cheese played well with the tender, caramelized potato. Instead of only adding salt and umami, this time I went in an even sweeter direction, drizzling it with honey and sprinkling it with sea salt. It was the best combination yet, reminding me of a sweet potato casserole you might serve at Thanksgiving.
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Was the dish as life-changing as I’d hoped? No. Even so, I would eat it again — especially as a desk lunch. It was perfectly tasty, it satiated me for hours, and it was so easy to prepare. All I’d have to do is roast (or even microwave) a sweet potato the night or morning before and pack it up along with a wedge of cheese, plus any toppings I feel like having that day.
That’s the true beauty of Cook Bales’ lunch content. Desk lunches don’t have to involve hours of meal prep or be life-changing in order to bring you some simple pleasure. Instead, it’s okay to rely on just a few high-quality ingredients that happen to taste pretty good together, all arranged on a plate or stuffed inside a sweet potato.
Disclaimer: This news article has been republished exactly as it appeared on its original source, without any modification.
We do not take any responsibility for its content, which remains solely the responsibility of the original publisher.
Author:Amelia Schwartz
Published on:2026-01-19 17:01:00
Source: www.foodandwine.com
Disclaimer: This news article has been republished exactly as it appeared on its original source, without any modification. We do not take any responsibility for its content, which remains solely the responsibility of the original publisher.
Author: uaetodaynews
Published on: 2026-01-19 18:23:00
Source: uaetodaynews.com