This Spud's for You!

Sitting outdoors at my picnic table and drinking hot tea this overcast August afternoon, the sun’s warm rays reach through the cloud deck and warm my skin till sweat beads on my lip. My mind, dulled by the fatigue of late summer, needs the caffeine boost to keep alert as I peel a half bushel of potatoes.  My steel paring knife cuts through each hard white potato, cleaving off the skins juicily and shedding the peels into an antique enamel pan at my feet.  Another white potato cleaned of its dusty cover, drops into a massive, speckled stock pot.  Soon, I will take the cleaned potatoes into the kitchen for a last wash, a chop and ten minutes of boiling to prepare them for canning.  

The bounty of spading fork-speared, bug-bitten, green-skinned second-quality potatoes lying about the house will not last for more than a week or two before going soft and stinky.  Better pare off the bad spots and can them up now to line the shelves of the pantry for winter’s quiet, cold days.

Peeled potatoes ready to be quartered and boiled.

Simmering Kennebec potatoes before hot packing in jars and canning.

Though the late heat has finally arrived, I can feel the earth swinging steadily in its orbit towards fall.  The shorter days, the fattening apples, the ripe, orange pumpkins lying among dry grasses announce  autumn’s dawning.  And that makes the potatoes in my stock pot feel like money in the bank against winter hunger.

A dozen quarts of pressure-canned potatoes stand ready for winter.

At harvest time, I like to imagine what early people would think of the box after box of tubers the potato plow unearthed.  After David’s tractor has pulled the long potato furrows and turned up hard, fat spuds -- goose-egg sized Red Gold and Natascha golden roasters, or long Banana fingerlings, or Yukon Golds as big as a man’s fist, or massive Kennebec white potatoes almost as big as my foot -- I calculate the wealth in calories we possess.  At the end of each 25-foot row of our potato patch, we fill a bushel box, netting roughly 20,000 calories of energy.  More for red-skinned potatoes (440 calories/pound for russets), and less for white (319 calories/pound for white, boiled).  At 60 pounds per bushel, that’s between 19,140 and 26,400 calories in a box.  Looked at another way, the USDA defines a serving of potatoes as a single, half-pound potato, so that 60 pound box contains 120 servings of potatoes -- mashed, roasted, baked or fried.

Our first harvest of Natascha Golden Roasters

These white potatoes will serve us this winter, but my favorite summertime potato recipe is for roasted potatoes, using the special golden roasters we grow each year:

Hawk’s Hill’s Favorite Roasted Potatoes

1 quart roasting potatoes

1-2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Pour olive oil onto large cookie sheet.  Wash and dice into 1” cubes, Red Gold or Natascha golden roasting potatoes.  Or slice Banana fingerlings lengthwise.  Pat dry.  Place, cut side down, onto cookie sheet.  You may brush tops with more olive oil.  Sprinkle on salt to taste.  Bake for 15-20 minutes, until tines of a fork insert easily into the potato pieces.  Serve immediately.  We make a dinner out of chili beans and potatoes, with sauteed greens, summer squash or green beans on the side.  Quick, hearty and delicious.

Bon appetit!

Betsy