Boil the Breakfast Early

Decided I wanted a baked (pron: Bake-ed) potato for lunch today.

But I had no potatoes. Or did I? I already harvested the new potatoes from Yukon Cornelius. I went back to the well about a week later and got these tiny little things that were barely a snack. No. I needed a full sized potato. To the Community Garden!

The thing about the Community Garden is this: it's basically a communist thing and people, especially here, in the U.S., and especially in the most American City in the U.S., Tonawanda, don't know how to be communists.

I know that sentence is a lot to digest. I'm gonna let you try to digest it. You can write some ill advised replies to this post. Impugn my character. Then STFU and let me explain. I'll wait.

Are you back? Ok. See, the community garden allows anyone to just walk in and pick the fruits--or vegetables--of anyone's labor. Some people pick the place clean, I've been told. Leaving nothing for their fellow Tonawandanderer. Possibly some of the crop is even harvested by the North Tonawandese. I don't know. But that is the explanation for the communist bit.

The Most American city thing. It just is. You're gonna have to take my word on that. I know you won't because you're all modernized and citified, but I live in a place where a man's word means something.

Anyway, this potato thing. I got one out of the Community Garden.

It was very tasty. Which the staff at Google already know. I told them. I got an email shortly after I signed in to work on this post saying that my account had been accessed from Linux from Tonawanda (on my phone) and did I have anything to say about that? I did. I told them I have primarily been accessing my account (gmail) from Linux, since I, uh, got a gmail account. And I've been in Tonawanda since November. The second question on their survey/feedback thing was if I had anything else I wanted to talk about. So I mentioned that I had logged on to blog about the potato I had grown and cooked, and I gave them a little spoiler: I enjoyed it. I also gave them a link to this blog, so if there are any Google staff reading this, "Hello" .

Where was I? Oh yeah, potatoes. The ultimate thing to grow in a community garden filled with glass shards. Sort of. No one, and I've met some people who have gardened for years, no one seems to get potatoes. "Wait, you're growing potatoes? You can do that? How do you...pick them?"

I ain't gonna tell you. I will tell you that the potato plant produces a(n) tomato like fruit that you can pull seed from and grow edible potatoes from. Fruit itself? Deadly poison. I toyed with the idea of leaving these fruit on my potato plants to teach a lesson to the people who pick the garden 'dry' but...

is it my responsibility to inform the public that these are not tomatoes? It's an interesting ethical question.

Mystified by potatoes. People really are. Tomatoes everyone gets. Beans. Peas. I bet even carrots. I don't know if people just have never grown potatoes or don't know why you would want to, but people give me a 'really?' and say wow when I talk about growing corn on the stoop. But potatoes just mystify people.

More potatoes for me. No, I know you're gonna look up how to harvest potatoes. It's a 3 letter word starting with d, ending in g and not god backwards.

As for why to grow potatoes? The bar whose land the Community Garden is on is growing tomatoes, peppers and celery to make their own bloody mary mix. I pointed out that I was growing potatoes. "Get me a still, and we'll make the whole thing local."

Anyway. Potato like the one above. About half the size of a tennis ball. You wash, wrap in a paper towel and microwave for 5 minutes. Cut in half, cut into those halves to create channels, hit it with some butter or, as my grandmother who used to peel potatoes with a knife used to say, 'oleo' and some Goya Adobo seasoning. Gotta support the protectorates. Damn tasty.