Small potatoes
Several weeks ago, Daddykins planted some potatoes. It’s something he often does. If there’s a vegetable in the kitchen that looks slightly off, or if he finds a poor seed wedged between his ever decaying teeth, he will take it out into the back garden, and plant it to see if it’ll grow.
I can’t remember when it started. I just remember being informed of a large, white bucket placed on the garden bench. This bucket contained several potatoes which were long past their use-by date, and already had the little white sprouts coming from it. Naturally, these potatoes were covered in soil. He wanted to see if they’d actually grow. Of course, thanks to the laws set by Mother Nature, any root vegetable placed in enough soil to sufficiently feed the plant, will grow.
And it did.
I took photos of the plant during the whole growing pictures. Unfortunately, thanks to my utter incompetence, I appear to have deleted all photos I took of it, so you won’t be able to see them. They were awesome. Well, actually, they weren’t that good, but I have to keep the suspense.
The plants grew and grew, and unfortunately, thanks to the utterly shit weather we’ve had so far this “summer”, the plants themsevles became damaged and started to die off.
Daddykins announced this afternoon that he’d be interested in seeing how his experiment went, and that we would empty the afore-mentioned bucket of its vegetable matter.
Unfortunately, the first one picked out wasn’t exactly going to feed a starving family.
Delicious as it may have been, it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing we were hoping for. It ended up being discarded. My heart sank, I was hoping for a crop of golden potatoes. Instead, it looked like we’d grown a bag of slightly soft and mushy marbles. Groan.
It only took a short dig of a few centimetres before we began to get potatoes of slightly higher value, and they actually looked quite nice.
Occasionally, we’d discover the mushy remains of the “parent” potato, which had degraded to a soft paste. These were also discarded, though the dogs seemed to take a great interest in them before I shooed them away.
The more we dug, the more the potatoes kept coming. From a small experiment, we gathered enough to be actually useful.
Now that’s some good eatin’.
Originally, the plan was to boil them, with the skins on. A simple enough affair, until the idea of making them into chips (or at least the biggest ones) came into the mind of Daddykins. I simply laughed at the idea, thinking that no matter how large the crop was, there’d be no potato big enough to be a “chippy” potato.
I disappear upstairs, and download the photos off the camera card, or do something equally as inane. Several minutes later, I am summonsed to the kitchen, to see a great big pile of chips in the fryer. I am awestruck.
Needless to say, I piled the whole lot on the plate, slapped on a small amount of salt, and enjoyed them like I’ve never enjoyed a plate of chips in my whole life. They were just awesome.
Damn. It almost makes me want to take up gardening.