Monday Memories—SPT—Homemaking Tip

potato harvest 2008

This week our neighbors to the North started potato harvest. To me, the smell of potato dirt is finer than roses. I love potatoes. I only have one pet peeve and it has to do with my sacred cow, the potato. I dislike it when I’m standing in line at a buffet dinner and the person in front of me says, “Laws of mercy look at the size of these potatoes. I can’t eat a whole thing” and then turns to me and asks if I’ll split one with her. I have to patiently live with my peeve because I do not have the courage to say, “No ma’am. I eat potatoes three times a day and a half would only qualify as an appetizer. This is a meal and I think I’d better have a whole, but thank you for your offer.”

Last night as Cali and I finished our walk we gathered a shirtful of potatoes that the digger had dropped on the row ends. It reminded me of harvesting spuds, as Cali puts it “in one of your other lives,” and of the first personal essay I had published. It was fall and I was in Hawaii attending my first semester of college. Though plumeria smell wonderful and the ocean smells just as good neither is potato perfume and I missed it, so I wrote an essay on potato harvest for an assignment. An art teacher illustrated the essay and he gave me a strong resemblance to Romana or Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins’ friends. In all of my wildest aspirations, looking like Romana or Beezus wasn’t one of them; however his work was free and far be it from me not to be grateful for free, Romanafied or not. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the potato harvest essay:

SPT—Me, the clodpicker model

Each fall my sisters and I helped with the spud harvest on our farm. We began by tugging on skin-tight, butterfly-spotted long underwear, sweatshirts or leather vests, overalls, and goose-down coats. For accessories we added old red and white Filer High School ski caps, leather hiking boots, pairs of cotton cloth gloves with plastic Braille imprints on the palms, and goggles. Then, and only then were we ready to help harvest potatoes in Southern Idaho. We were the clod-pickers. No glamour, no thrill, just clod-pickers who picked clods, rocks, weeds, and rotten potatoes from the freshly harvested potatoes. We usually rode on the back of the harvester—the spud digger as we called it. Hooked onto the back of the tractor, it dug the potatoes and blew out most of the potato vines. Our harvester was dried-blood red and it shook convulsively when the tractor started. On the back of the harvester was a platform big enough for two people to stand to do their job. There weren’t many seconds to pick the clods before the conveyer chains stacked the potatoes onto the piler and into the back of the truck. We had to work quickly to pull as much debris from the potatoes as we could, guarding our hands and gloves from the conveyer rollers. The rollers turned so fast, I was sure our hands and arms would be swallowed by a gradual slurp of the machine if we weren’t careful.

One night I wished I wasn’t clod picking at all. It was not only late at night, we were late getting the harvest in and winter was early. It was wheezing cold wind and coughing snow. Water rot had attacked the potatoes. Water rot breaks down the potato membrane and makes it gushy, slimy, and black; it also stinks. I was cold and cross, my thin brown gloves were soaked and I was tired of scraping potato slime from them. My feet were refrigerated in the mounds of rotting potatoes and mud. My back ached from the hours of stooping over the machine. My head swam from the oscillating lamp that sloshed the light over the rolling spuds. I wanted to quit and go home. I knew most of the family was home and so was roast beef, potatoes, corn and peach pie. I couldn’t go home. The potatoes provided our livelihood and it didn’t matter that there were some rotten ones, there were still a lot more good than bad that needed to be harvested.

I learned many practical skills from harvesting potatoes. Scanning for weeds, rocks and clods taught me to scrutinize the kids’ faces quickly while on a run for the school bus. Ear wax, dirty glasses and unbrushed teeth didn’t stand a chance with a former clodpicker. But, even more important skills were learned that one frigid night. Sometimes water rot attacks a family. Unwanted breakdowns happen. But no matter how bad it stinks, no matter how cold it gets, no matter how bad it hurts, families are our livelihoods and even with some rotten spots there is more good than bad—it just takes harder and faster picking to save the crop.

Homemaking Tip: You guessed it. A potato tip because potatoes are high in fiber, completely natural, good tasting, and cheap. Here are some of my favorite toppings and a recipe for one. Chive Butter is so very good and it's nice to serve at large gatherings because it eliminates bowls by combining things and speeds up the serving process, too.

Broccoli & Cheese Sauce
Morrison's Magnificent Meatballs
Pizza Style
Taco Style
Chili & Cheese
Chive Butter
Sweet & Sour Chicken
Shredded BBQ pork or beef
‘Tater Pigs (a cooked link sausage slid into a potato)
My sister, Marcia, tops her baked potatoes with a cooked, frozen-pot-pie for a quick and easy meal

Chive Butter
1 cube butter
1 cube margarine
16 oz. sour cream
¼ cup chopped chives
½ pound cooked, crumbled bacon (*opt)

Mix all ingredients. Refrigerate at least 3 hours before serving.

What's your favorite baked potato topping?

What is a practical skill you learned at work that helped you in an unexpected way at home?