Please Pass the Potatoes

After an especially long and exhausting drive or flight, a grueling week at work, or a mind-numbing exam period — what’s the one thing you do to feel human again?

Road trips can be awesome, however, when a road trip expands days instead of just hours, it can be a soul suck.  When we used to road trip from Colorado to North Carolina the one thing I needed to feel human again and got every night when we would stop is mashed potatoes.  Ridiculous right?  There was something about having mashed potatoes and gravy every night that seemed to refresh me and get me ready for the next day.  It was like having a magical reset button pressed on my day.

That is probably the reason why our last trip East was so hard.  The weather was horrible and restaurants that you would normally get a hearty meal from were closed because of the blizzard.  We kept trying to push through the incoming weather, knowing that the next day we would probably not be able to drive.  So we pushed as far East as we could get.  We stopped in Indiana.  It was late, the snow was bad, and everything good to eat was closed.  I had made a huge pot of spaghetti for the road (solid food just in case the weather was bad).  It was packed in a huge Tupperware container in the cooler.  That is what we ended up eating every night we were on the road.  I needed my mashed potatoes.  I wasn’t sleeping.  I wasn’t resting.  I poured so much caffeine into my body that I got sick.  It was horrible.

This is why I believe the one thing I need to survive a long road trip and feel human again when it’s over is mashed potatoes and gravy.  Soul food is good for the soul after all.