Finish your potatoes!

I guess it's usually carrots, sprouts, or spinach that parents are telling their children to finish before they can leave the table. Not potatoes — they are too delicious. Boiled, mashed, fried, sauteed, baked, roasted... let me count the ways.

King Edward potatoes grown in our garden

I finished our potatoes day before yesterday. No, I didn't eat them all — I dug them all. Harvested them. There were half a dozen plants left out of the two dozen or so that we planted last spring. Jean and Nick of A Very Grand Pressigny gave us the seed potatoes as a gift. Jean had carefully sprouted — "chitted" — them in egg cartons on her window sill in England before bringing them to France in early April.

Sorted by size and ready to go into the cellar
for good eating this autumn and winter.

I planted them in a plot out in the far back corner of our garden where a big compost pile used to be located. The soil there is rich, black, and loose, and therefore perfect for root vegetables. The potatoes — of the British variety called King Edwards — obviously liked the growing conditions. The potatoes above represent the harvest from just five or six plants.

Some of these will go into a truffade this coming weekend.

One of my next kitchen projects is to make a truffade using these potatoes. La truffade is a specialty of the Auvergne region that we learned about last September when we went down there for a few days. Here's a recipe from a post I did last year. Try it. It's easy, and it's very rich and filling.