Potato Tub is Thriving

Hmm... this program has decided that all photos should be centered, no matter what format I choose. Anyway, the potatoes in tubs experiment is going well so far. My little fingerlings are growing fast and lush, and I am indulging premature dreams of two harvest this year.

The test will come when the weather gets hot and stays hot, should that happen.

Gardening with the grandbaby

Hailey has laid out lunch for "the guys," who are invisible to me: kale, walnuts, apple slices, and grape hyacinths. She ended up eating the apple and playing spitting games with most of the kale. She seems to be entering the "no greens" stage. She loves to pick them but not to eat them. We'll see how she feels when the sugarsnaps are ready.


I had some time with Hailey, so I was happy to abandon desk work in favor of a bit of gardening. We planted a small flat of chard starts (on sale, and I only have a few wintered-over plants), seeded some salad greens in a big pot on the deck, and put a few fingerling potatoes in the white pot to Hailey's left in the picture, with a mixture of compost, potting soil, and peat moss.

I've been reading up on various potato schemes. Lots of hype from sites with something to sell; lots of tales of failure from gardeners who have tried growing them in buckets, barrels, tires, etc. However, most of the sad stories I've read so far focus on too much sun in southern climes, which baked or at least shriveled the spuds before they could reproduce much. That's not likely to be a problem for me and I am very short of suitable garden spots for potatoes. Of course I live in a great potato growing region, and I can choose from a wonderland of organic varieties at the food co-op and the farmers market. I don't need to grow my own. But I do love harvesting them, so it's worth a try. Right next to the potato pot is the Meyer lemon, which has survived a couple of light freezes since I put it back outside and looks about to wake up and start growing new leaves. March is a great month.

I also stopped by Twisted S ranch in Ferndale today and bought some buffalo meat: brisket and osso bucco. I figure to give the brisket the old-school Julia Child daube treatment. It's rare that I buy an expensive cut of meat, so I may as well put some time into the preparation. That means it probably won't happen this week, but I hope it's soon.

Potatoes Cheer Me Up

Maybe because I’m fighting a cold, potatoes sound great to me today. So I’m reprising part of a column I did years ago for the Cascadia Weekly, back when it was still the Bellingham Weekly.

For me potatoes are the ultimate comfort food. Bland predictability is surely a big part of a spud's appeal: baked, mashed or fried, what you see is what you get. Still, I like to branch out, and Bellingham is a good place to do it. Herewith, some of my favorites:

Greek hashbrowns at the Rhodes Cafe. This is our Sunday morning breakfast favorite. They don't even bring us a menu anymore; I know what I like. Perfect hashbrowns of the chunky, not shredded, variety, topped with lots of lightly sautéed green pepper, olives, tomato, and onion, and sprinkled with feta. A half-portion is huge. Little Cheerful and Tony's do credible hashbrowns, but Rhodes's are the best.

Mashed potato chile relleno at Pepper Sisters. Mashed potatoes can be tricky. Since their smooth blandness--and their ability to soak up butter and gravy--is a big part of their appeal, innovations can easily go wrong. Some garlic is great, but too many additions miss the point. This dish deals with this dilemma by keeping the interest on the outside and leaving the mashed potato filling pretty much alone except for a few red pepper flakes. The chile, which too often is covered by a sliding mask of fluffy, tasteless egg batter, at Pepper Sisters gets coated in a thin layer of crispy cornmeal. That’s a big improvement in my opinion. Then the whole concoction rests on a pretty pink ancho chile cream sauce, just hot enough to enliven the proceedings without overwhelming the potato. Pepper Sisters' signature hominy and beans are the perfect foils for this unassuming dish. Potato and garlic enchiladas are another Pepper Sisters standby, but I like the rellenos better.

Casa Que Pasa's potato burritos are also justly famous, both for their sauce, their size, and their value for dollar.

If cold mashed potatoes are your secret guilty pleasure, you may be cheered to know that there's a recipe, from Peru where the potato story began, that dignifies your midnight snack.. I've seen many versions. This one is from the Territorial Seed Company Garden Cookbook.

Papas a la Huancaina
Ingredients
6 to 8 medium potatoes, peeled (Yellow Finns or Purple Peruvians recommended)
1 cup cottage cheese
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup grated firm goat cheese (you could substitute feta)
enough lettuce leaves to cover 4 plates
1/2 cup chopped parsley
4 sliced hard cooked eggs, optional
black or green olives, optional

Instructions
Boil potatoes until soft. Remove from heat, mash immediately and add cottage cheese, cumin, and salt. (Especially with firm varieties like Yellow Finn or Purple Peruvian, if you wait till the potatoes cool your mash will be gooey instead of fluffy.) Arrange lettuce leaves on the plates. When potato mixture has cooled to room temperature, divide onto the lettuce. Sprinkle with goat cheese or feta and parsley and garnish with eggs and olives, if used.
Serves 4

Rhodes Cafe, 1046 Lakeway Drive, next to Cost Cutter, 714-9743
Pepper Sisters, 1055 N. State St., 671-3414
Casa Qué Pasa, 1415 Railroad Ave., 738-8226

Locavore note:
Potatoes, by the way, were probably the earliest introduced crop in this region. Tribes accustomed to maintaining prairies for camas harvest adopted the techniques to the potatoes that arrived with early European explorers. Native Americans were harvesting spuds on Whidbey Island by the early 1800s.

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