Courtney Cook Bales is certainly not the first person to eat a baked sweet potato whole — nor even to stuff hunks of cheese into a baked sweet potato then eat it whole — but she sure makes you want to do it.
Perhaps it’s the wide-eyed expression of complete and utter ecstasy paired with the aggressive head tilt she does as she takes a bite.
Whatever it is, it’s garnered her over a million followers on TikTok in a mere seven months. Her students brought her balloons to celebrate the milestone.
“I do not feel interesting enough for all that,” she tells TODAY.com in her first-ever interview. “I don’t know how this is happening.”
Cook Bales is a 36-year-old high school English teacher and bonsai enthusiast who lives in Fayetteville, Georgia, with her husband, James, and their four children. And in mid-May, she decided to start posting her meals on TikTok.
“I’m a nosy person, and I like to know what people have for lunch. As a teacher, sometimes we all eat together, and I’m always like, ‘What are you having for lunch?’” she says. “It’s like an insight into someone’s day and someone’s personality, someone’s preferences.”
And on that day in May, she was ready to share her rather unique preferences with the world.
“I like British food, which is kind of a niche as an American,” she says.
Teaching British literature to 12th graders, Cook Bales has long been intrigued by the cuisine that gave us queen of puddings and spotted dick.
“I kind of just read British novels,” she says, specifically shouting out Jane Austen, “and there would be some sort of, like, banquet scene, and I would read the descriptions of the lavish foods,” and she just had to try them.
It began with a humble can of Heinz beans in tomato sauce because that’s what her local Publix had, but it opened up a whole world of eating to her.
She began posting her British roast dinners — always complete with a Yorkshire pudding — on TikTok every Sunday. Then, a follower suggested she should try a ploughman’s lunch. That’s when her account really started taking off.
For the uninitiated, a ploughman’s lunch is a British cold meal based around bread, cheese and fresh or pickled onions, commonly served with a beer at a pub. Though bread and cheese have been the basis of the diet of English rural laborers for centuries, this specific term was coined by the Milk Marketing Board as a PR push to increase the sale of cheese in the 1960s.
“It’s honestly one of my favorite lunches,” says Cook Bales. “It hits all the categories: crunchy, sour, sweet, creamy. It’s just perfect.”
One could say the ploughman’s lunch is a precursor to the girl dinner, so it makes sense that it would strike such a similar chord on TikTok.
Her gleeful, liberal use of British condiments — from Branston Pickle (which she lovingly refers to as “Branny P”) and Piccalilli to Heinz Salad Cream — has viewers in an absolute chokehold.
“You have easily grown into my favorite creator,” wrote one such fan on a video. “I could literally watch you all day. You radiate sunshine and I loved learning new things!”
“I love your videos so much that I ration them by not looking at your page and just letting them come to me naturally on my fyp like a little lottery if that makes sense,” commented another.
This sunshiney attitude is the reason some of her followers now call her the “Ms. Rachel for adults.”
“I love that comment so much,” she says. “(Ms. Rachel) brings a lot of comfort, a lot of joy, a lot of engagement, and I’m glad that I’ve had such a positive influence on so many.”
Cook Bales has also had an influence on the way TikTok users eat. If you’re on the Courtney Cook side of TikTok, your For You page is likely inundated with people eating whole sweet potatoes stuffed with Butterkäse cheese.
Here’s how she makes them: Bake at 300 F in an air fryer or oven for 1 hour (add 20 minutes if it’s a big one). Turn the air fryer/oven off and leave the sweet potato in there for 1 to 2 hours. (“The slow cooling is so important for the texture,” she says.) She then sticks two rectangular pieces of cheese into the sweet potato, one on top of the other. And that’s it.
Cook Bales thinks the sweet potato symbolizes “a new, modern way to connect with people,” she says. “You hear ideas, other people try their own things, and then sometimes they comment or they share verbally, and it’s just a way to make a friend even in this virtual 2025 world.”
And she is cultivating a community of sweet potato snackers.
This may come as a surprise to them, but she didn’t grow up in an “ingredient household,” one that has the ingredients used to make meals rather than ready-to-eat meals or snacks.
“I had fabulous parents … but neither one of them were home cooks, so we had the late-’90s, early-2000s freezer meals, Hamburger Helper,” she says. “So I never really was exposed to any sort of global flavors.”
Now that she’s in charge of the food in her own home, there’s more of a “balance,” she says. “We have simple ingredients and then we have the processed snacks.”
When she grocery shops, she doesn’t make a plan. “I just buy a bunch of ingredients and I just make it work somehow with whatever is in the fridge,” she explains. “And that’s probably what leads to my interesting combinations.
“I bought the Butterkäse cheese. I bought the sweet potatoes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but a new baby was born.”
Her own babies “have been good about trying new things” since she started this online endeavor, she says. Beans on toast and sticky toffee pudding were hits. “It’s certainly widened their palates. And then James, he’s an eat-whatever-is-in-front-of-him type of man.”
As far as what’s next on her journey, Cook Bales says she’s eager to travel. She’s planning her first-ever trip to the U.K. for this summer.
“I’ve been in contact with a couple of new TikTok friends who have invited me to stay near them and show me around,” she says. “I’m really looking forward to that.”
But her favorite dish of all time, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t British — it’s Korean.
“Korean army stew,” she says, that familiar wide-eyed look returning to her face. She first tried budae-jjigae at a Korean restaurant in Okinawa, Japan, where she once lived with her husband when he was deployed there. “It’s comforting, it’s salty, it’s sweet, it’s hot. You can have it with cold kimchi and daikon radish pickles and onion cups.”
She plans to return to both Japan and South Korea at some point and do some vlogging. But no matter how far this TikTok thing goes, she doesn’t think she could ever give up teaching, she says. “It really fills my cup.”
It helps her fill the cups of so many on TikTok as their “comfort creator.”
“Girlfriend, I just love your videos,” commented one viewer. “Simple, cute, homey, cozyyyyy. Does it get better?”
Others swear, as they watch her scarf down a whole green onion, she must have been a bunny in a past life.
“I want to be the cute, happy bunny that’s eating good,” says Cook Bales. “Maybe in an onion field, living her best life.”
