Eat your potatoes

HELLO EVERYONE! It might come as a surprise to you that my grandparents immigrated to Canada. Like most immigrants, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade, a brand new home, a high paying job and a suitcase full of 100 dollar bills.

Wait, no I have that wrong: they got little help from anyone and had to scratch out a living where they could. Like most European immigrants, part of survival came in the form of small starchy nuggets found in the ground that my grandpa called aardappelen or as we know them now, potatoes.

The potato was still revered as the miracle vegetable in my home when I grew up. It felt like we had boiled potatoes every night of the week. I hated them. The only way I could eat them was by dumping half a bottle of ketchup on them or, if we were lucky, mixed with some apple sauce. If we didn’t eat them, “EET JE AARDAPPELEN OF JE ZAL EEN PAK SLAAG KRIJGEN, JE ONDANKBAAR KIND!”  Roughly translated: “dear, it is in your best interests that you eat your potatoes…”

This reverence got a little obscene. My mother would try to sew potato skins into clothing for us and my dad would brew his own fuel for the car with fermented potatoes. I knew things were out of hand when we were forced to hold bowls of potatoes for all of our family pictures.

When I was finally freed from my childhood and moved out, I learned about the wonders of mashed potatoes, hashbrowns, French fries, baked potatoes, scalloped potatoes and the like. Through years of rehabilitation I’ve been able to appreciate this vegetable again, despite my difficulties.

But all joking aside, the potato is an amazing vegetable. Besides being very versatile in culinary use, it also stores well in cool dark places, which allows it to be used as a food source well into the winter. And, they can be very delicious.

And, you can tell I do actually appreciate my mom’s cooking, because we’ve grown two acres of our own potatoes this year, Yukon Gold and Nicola. And, now you can enjoy them too! I mulched the tops of the potato plants this week and will be starting to harvest them early next week, available at Nature’s Pickin’s around the same time.

They are no-spray and I boiled some the other night for old time’s sake. They were delicious. So, come on down and buy some and eat like an immigrant!

-Peter

PS – check out the video part of this post on our Instagram