new pota­toes

Growing up in Prince Edward Island made me a potatophile from day one.

I made mashed pota­toes for my after-school snack, eaten while watch­ing “The Facts of Life”.

I dated a guy in high school based solely on the fact that he worked in a dairy and could be counted on to show up at my door with a tub of sour cream, our family’s favourite condi­ment, every time he came to take me to the movies.

Walking through my mother’s herb gar­den past normal-sized patches of thyme, rose­mary and chervil, you’d be ill-prepared for the sud­den “Day of the Triffids” moment when you came to the end where the dill and chives grew. The dill and chives were a gar­den unto them­selves, a mas­sive plant­ing that got attacked with scis­sors every day until the snow flew.

No truffled-dusted foie gras for us, the dish we roman­ti­cized and talked of the most was always the first potato salad of the year, when mom would dig the new pota­toes out of the earth sec­onds before boil­ing them and toss­ing them with fresh dill, chives, chopped egg and may­on­naise. This would always be served up with a lob­ster boil.

Sitting around the pic­nic table in garbage bag pon­chos we would hack away at the hard red shells while ice cubes popped and cracked in the pitcher of Grape Fizz (gin­ger ale mixed with Welch’s Grape Juice), until we had a plate piled high with lob­ster meat and potato salad to be eaten com­pletely with our sun-brown hands.

A new potato salad is still the only thing that can take my atten­tion away from a lob­ster tail.

Snowflakes mean a dif­fer­ent kind of prepa­ra­tion for pota­toes, most often mashed or baked. Sometimes you just want to build your own per­fect baked potato, a lovely DIY project on the din­ner plate. When Wendy’s started offer­ing the ulti­mate in home­made, slow roasted, com­fort food as a ready in sec­onds menu item a lit­tle bit of me died inside.

The only way to fix it was to get into the kitchen and cook some bacon, chop some chives, grate a lit­tle aged ched­dar and open a tub of sour cream while the rus­sets slowly steamed in their jackets.