Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Porch Potatoes

Will I ever get finished pampering these potatoes. Sweet? -- my hind leg! Our Irish potatoes know how to behave. We dug them when we were ready. With very little dusting off, we put them in mesh bags on a lower shelf in the kitchen. Here, they patiently await our dining pleasure. And there are so many ways to serve potatoes of the Irish variety. I can think of less than a dozen ways to fix these roots. Why can’t the sweet potatoes be as versatile and well-behaved as the Irish spuds?

First, the little darlings can’t stand to have soggy vines left on them after the first frost. Then, they demand that we pull them up in short order or they’ll spoil because they don’t like wet feet. Of course, they didn’t like being covered in wet clay out of the ground either. We carefully separated them into trays that allowed air flow for them to dry. Apparently, they found the temperature and barometric pressure in Mamie’s garage to be less than ideal. When we started moving them to Mamie’s laundry room, we found that many of them had already rotted. Oh joy! Another opportunity to interact with our “sweet” spuds.

I hauled our share home -- residual mud, rotten babies and all. I sorted them, yet again, into edible versus compost-ready. The still-good potatoes, I laid out on our metal mesh table in the sun on the porch. Hopefully, a little sunbathing will get them ready for their long winter’s nap. I didn’t know where they’d go after that, as the root cellar is too damp for them.

Mamie suggested hiding them below our bed, but the jams have claimed that space. I told Mamie that I was reluctant to move the jams for fear that they were the origin of our sweet dreams. She reminded me that these potatoes are, after all, sweet potatoes, so I should move the jams to the RV and allow the potatoes the under-bed option. Mamie also reminded me that I could go ahead and cook and freeze them for later consumption. I’d love to do this, but then I’d have to invest several hundred dollars in another freezer to store several dollars worth of potatoes.

Very few of our crop made it to the big-boy stage, which greatly disappointed Mamie. I told her that we shouldn’t be too worked up over this, as there was a real market for fingerling potatoes in gourmet foods. Crop failure is probably what led some genius to create demand for “baby” vegetables. If only we were raising potatoes for sale, we may have made out better this way. Even with all the waste, we did end up with several bushels of sweet spuds, fingerling and otherwise. Shirley gratefully accepted some, as did Leal when she dropped by for a chat.

Having washed, peeled and prepared the damaged potatoes that had some salvage value, I must admit that whipped with a little syrup, butter and cinnamon they were quite a nice accompaniment to our pork chops and mixed greens.