September 6, 2024

Potato

Some say it shouldn’t go in a sandwich, some say it’s the most versatile vegetable, and some say it in a high-pitched lit when they first meet me and realise it’s not an American accent, but an Irish one they’re hearing¹. Generally, I like potatoes. I don’t regularly cook them, unless it’s for something elaborate, like a roast, or Hasslebacks, or chips soaked over night and cut with the orange and brown mandolin I got from the seventies via the charity shop two doors down.

It may sound ridiculous to someone who’s ever boiled a kettle, but even in their most basic iteration potatoes are effort. When I cook dinner atm (because who cooks potatoes for lunch?), it’s either because I have something fun I want to try, or because I’m already hungry, oh God, how am I so hungry, it’s not even six. If it’s something fun, then yes, the time is being put in - so why would I just boil a potato, when I could have something much more fun? And if I’m already hungry, then, Jesus, I’m not going to get out heavy things, wash them, check for eyes², potentially have to cut out the eyes/poison nightshade bruises, boil the kettle, and have them bubble away for minimum 30 mins - probably forty. And THEN drain the hot, heavy thing. Feck that. I’m going to 1) decide whether peanut butter on toast is a viable option 2) boil some pasta. Even when I put the rice cooker on for forty minutes, that forty minutes is quicker than a potato’s forty minutes, and I’ll tell you for why, because effort. Pasta - you don’t have to wash, though you do have to drain, and the pot is lighter, so less peril. Rice - you don’t have to drain and sure, you need to wash, but you feel a bit like a magician watching the water uncloud, decloud, discloud while swirling the grains between your fingers. This is not an anti-potato screed. It’s just a very, very interesting and not at all basic bitch analysis of why I don’t cook potatoes, yo.

All of which means the fridge very rarely (read: never) has leftovers from the two-each-and-one-for-the-pot sitting waiting to be made into a potato salad, and, let’s face it, if they were there, I would be 100% looking to make potato³ cakes with them, à la Granny Cox.

But these potatoes looked fun.

And I have vaguely committed to semi-regularly cooking recipes from this book, so here we are now.

The recipe is patatas bravas inspired (or papa bravas as Sohla names them, which threw me for a Googling), but to me, that just means that there’s a smoked paprika vibe. I, again, couldn’t bear the idea of boiling potaoes (Jesus, that’s a new one) po-tay-toes for lunch, and I also didn’t think I could sell it as a sole entrée so I. Made. A. Game. Plan.

I had beets, I had carrots, I had no more celery OR cucumber, but I also thought that I could whack something fun together with the theme “smoked paprika + ??? = good times”. A friend once made a delicious chorizo and chickpea stew that I recall whenever the tomato passata and chickpea stacks stumble together in the back of the press. It was added to the list.

Part of this bloglet is allowing me to practise (practice?) different skills: cooking, baking, writing etc. The current chapter is Taste, but really, I wanted to get good at game plans. How to break down the pieces and make them all flow sensibly⁴. To make sense of a meal, when I’m so good at improvising. How not to feel trapped by my own instructions. How to bring desire and purpose to days that my body tells me to keep open and my mind tells me are a waste. How to bring that purpose without purpose becoming obsession and obsession turning into something I need another break from.

I had my limits:

1. Dinner at seven

2. Include Bravas Potato Salad

3. Use up the veg from the garden/fridge

4. Don’t be spending lots of money

5. 

I read through Sohla’s recipe. I wrote the steps on post it notes, then tore them into sections. I went through my other, mind-forged, recipes and did the same. I guessed at the length of time each task might take (I would say estimate, but that belies an expertise around time-management that I have not yet developed). I got some pretty scheduling paper and placed out the steps. Which made sense to go first? What could be done in parallel? I added other steps, or ripped in two instructions that encompassed too much. I put 19:00 at the bottom of the page and worked back. I gave myself a little more flexibility, then took it away. To get the Bravas, a garden coleslaw, and faux-chorizo (vegan Quorn sausages doused in that smoked pap) chickpea stew out on time, I needed to start at 17:45.

The whole planning process took about 15 minutes (could have been five or an hour, the truth is not out there, don’t go looking), and it’s the type of thing I am always thinkingI should do. But this is someone who thinks the forty minutes rice and potatoes take to prepare are fundamentally different, so to make this sort of game plan regularly, does, in all honesty, make me hate the version of me that would do that. What a waste of good paper and good mooching time. We’ll eat either way at the end of it. I’m not going to fuck up too badly, it’l be pretty tasty, and yeah, sure the last few times I’ve taken it in my head to cook dinner, we’re looking at eight forty table setting, but sure, that’s fine. Have an apple, you’ll be fed.

To sit down at a quarter past seven though, with all tasks completed, little mental ticks of each task achieved: tasting the salted water for boiling; pouring hot oil over the spices; mandolining the beets and carrots while the chickpeas simmered in the passata; tasting, tasting, tasting the coleslaw dressing I was making up but trying to balance with the rich stew and creamy potato salad. Everything was as I made it to be, not as I stumbled into, that was a nice feeling. Not that it was all perfect, but it was fun to think of adjustments, not just be ashamed of missing out on something or covering up an error. (For example: there really wasn’t enough salt in that water, the powdered cayenne pepper and smoked paprika probably burned a little, which gave a kind of acrid edge to the potatoes, crisps are an unneccessary flourish - they soak up the dressing too quickly and lose their crunch [possibly ‘kettle chips’ are a type of super-fried thicker American crisps which keep their crunch better, but #wontdomyownresearch]).

And yeah, fifteen minutes off, but that’s fine. I wasn’t harried, I wasn’t lax, I just didn’t think the potatoes were quite done, and I wanted to stack the cookware and wipe the surfaces before sitting down to eat. So an extra fifteen. But it had some purpose. In that Game Plan recommendation, I keep coming back to Sohla’s reasoning:

“by not wasting my thoughts on what I’m going to do next, I can target all my energy into what I’m doing right now”

It’s so much harder than it sounds. And I don’t like that I have to really make myself do it. But I don’t like it when I don’t either.⁵