Potatoes are a staple in our house.
I’d come home from work and my husband would have a pot of potatoes on the stove. He’s Irish and he’s been brought up on potatoes. (But beware the stereotype: he doesn’t like Guinness.)
We did have a period where there were too many nights of potatoes and the children revolted. Understandably. Interestingly, the nutritionist talks about ‘food jag’, when something is repeated too often within 48 hours, this results in a limited diet and also can mean a person refuses that particular food after a while. Food jag can be avoided by, for example, a subtle change such as using a different kind of sugar for porridge, or presenting it differently. I appreciate this change isn’t subtle to someone with food wary-ness, though, so it takes a bit to sell it and get savvy with the changes. I have a list of changes in my head for our regular foods, but I am not good at writing up menus for the week. This relaxed approach has come to an end as we face isolation and limited supermarket visits.
We do rely on certain foods (yup, it’s the carbohydrates). I am a bit worried about the potential for dwindling supplies of weetbix, oats, rice… not helped by images of people ransacking supermarkets. Commenting on this frantic buying, an Irish survivalist recently said (like others before him), that ‘hunger is the best sauce’. I get that. It’s why we have regular exercise in our house and limit snacks before meals. But I am a bit concerned about adopting a very different space food-wise, on top of the sadness, fearfulness, and unsettled-ness of a pandemic...
Back to the tatties. Potatoes are very flexible: add toppings to boiled or roasted spuds, mash them, slice them into rounds and bake in the oven to make lovely chips, etc etc.
The toppings! Beans: baked beans, fancy mexican beans, pesto-covered white beans. I have seen in a magazine delicious ideas with pastrami + sauerkraut, steak + kimchi…
My husband mashes boiled spuds with a fork, then half mashes-half stirs baked beans in with them, adding butter. I think it looks a bit gross, but the children love it and I can’t quite seem to replicate the dish to their satisfaction.
My mother does a free-for-all choose-your-own topping extravaganza with wee bowls of creamed corn, bacon, herbs, grated cheese, sour cream, chopped scallions. That works pretty well for those of us who have strong preferences.
What to do with leftover boiled potatoes? What we do...fry them to make wedges (as long as they don’t get too crispy - not a desirable texture for my wary eater), eat them cold with mayo (my daughter enjoys this), make a proper potato salad (me, I am all about gherkins and capers and mayo, the sourness and the creaminess), skin, cube them, and reheat slowly, then mash them once warm with butter.
Yum.