Following the advice of a Guide to Growing Delicious Vegetables, Fruits & Herbs, I dug up some spuds for which the green tops had died back. I’d planted a few rows of Purple Viking potatoes late in the season (end of May) — not ideal. However, the foot-high plants were one of the few things not eaten into the ground by pests this summer, so they are champions in my yard even though several of them suddenly shriveled up before harvest.
To my surprise I found six small but perfectly edible potatoes. Just sitting there in the dirt. Potatoes. This vegetable becomes so many dishes that are good it was surreal to find that my lot had produced some of them.
Potatoes.
So, I brought them inside, scrubbed them into brilliant shades of purple, sliced them thin, revealing clean, cream-colored, starchy goodness — then proceeded to make the most horrendously over-salted, over-peppered, over-milked and floured scalloped potatoes. We spooned courageously, blindly, through several mouthfuls of the glop before giving up the potatoes as lost to Betty Crocker.
But underneath the burning, stultifying saltiness I could tell the little Vikings were good. Damn good.
[...] haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009). Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems [...]