Billy's Birthday Potatoes
It's my dear chum "Farmer Bill's" birthday in November and as usual I let myself be conned into cooking his birthday dinner, for around fourteen people. "I don't care what you make" he said, "but I want a lot of potatoes with it". Bill, you see, grew spuds for most of his farming life, support the old firm I suppose.
"Ok" I said "go and get some for me" which he did and must have come back with 25kg or more, full of soil straight from his brother's field. Almost as much muck as potato!
How the blazes am I going to clean them and get dinner ready on time I thought to myself? Then as I was heaving the sack through the utility room beside the back door, came the brainwave. Why not heave them straight into the washing machine? Yes why not? I did and it worked.
Make sure there are no dirty (or clean for that matter) underpants lurking inside, load the drum with the potatoes, set the programme to cold wash and high speed spin, then voila! In about twenty minutes you'll have a machine full of polished potatoes ready to cook, roast, boil or bake!
"ELF and SAFETY WARNING!" DO NOT put washing powder or fabric conditioner in the machine.
Oh and another thing. It's such a drag peeling tons of spuds, so if you have one of those frenchy, cheffy, windyroundy apple peeling machines, use it to peel your potatoes. You get a nice furrowed finish and a long tail of potato peel. Then deal with the result as you like and for the super frugal, you can deep fry the skin you peel off as a fancy garnish or curly whirlysnack!
We used to have a potato peeler. This was a plastic bowl device, about the size of a french salad whizzer, with a pelton wheel (non-engineers - look it up) underneath, sandpapery base and walls. Put the spuds in, attach to the kitchen tap, turn on, and roughed up clean spuds emerged. The ground down peelings went straight down the sink. Not the greenest device but effective. We may have got it when we lived in Denmark in the early '50s. The only downside (apart from the Water consumption) - if you left it too long you got affy wee tatties!
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