My part of the world is not kind to potatoes, or wheat, or sugar cane. More and more I am realising that our northern European food culture, imported along with the first fleet, makes very hard work of it. The food crops that dominate the Farmer’s Market are mostly south-east Asian, African, Central American, or Pacific Islander. Besides all the wonderful range of greens and fruits, there’s the starchy calorie…
My potato crop last year was very sad. The plants wilted before they flowered, and the potatoes hadn’t finished developing. The largest were only golf ball size. We don’t eat a lot of potatoes – I tend to regard them as a seasonal vegetable rather than a storage staple – but new potatoes are such a treat I was determined to get a yield this year.
This is the last of the potato based Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipes for this year. We’ve had a nice month of eating new potatoes most days and the basket is getting low. From now on it will get too hot, particularly at night, for potatoes to crop well here.
It must be the moment in the year when eggs and potatoes both peak together to create the perfect seasonal food moment.
I’ve started harvesting the new potatoes, and I had all sorts of recipes in mind for them. But then, with them actually out of the ground and lightly scrubbed (they come out from under the mulch almost clean), I couldn’t think of anything better than just to boil them and eat them as they are. Sometimes I think you can overelaborate cooking. Parsley and Mustard Hollandaise Recipe:
These are the spuds I planted back in early August. They grow so fast! I planted them in a trench about 20 cm deep and I’ve been pulling the compost in around the stems, leaving just the top leaves exposed as they grow.
No time for shopping, no creativity for interesting cooking, no patience for lasting more than half an hour. But when I’m this busy, I really don’t want to eat junk food – I can’t afford to get sick or run down.