It's Dinner Time at Chateau Sutton-Goar.....

....which has also come to be known as, "What potato concoction are we having tonight?"

I suppose it's sad that coming from Idaho, the state famous for growing potatoes, I know so little about them. I had no idea how many potatoes one plant could produce...although that does help explain the size of the plant. I didn't grow up in the part of Idaho that raises potatoes, so I'm mostly familiar with them as huge bakers sold in the store or the ever-present "Do you want fries with that?" of every restaurant in America.

In Southern Idaho--where the potatoes are--potato harvesting time is a very big affair, with kids even getting out of school to help with the harvest, so I imagined that they were a bit like onions or garlic with one definite harvest time. Now it seems that we get to harvest potatoes all summer--provided we can find them. The ones that pop out of the ground are pretty easy--and make it easy to figure out when to add more dirt--but we're getting some big monsters down deeper, which I have only now discovered.

I don't know if I truly taste the difference in the potatoes we're growing versus the ones in the store as I have generally bought Russet potatoes (Idaho bakers) in the store because they're more versatile, and we are growing reds. They're certainly good, and it's really handy to have them in the garden, but unlike the zucchini, I wasn't really aware of how big a harvest we would get, so I hadn't lined up a bunch of potato recipes to try. Tomatoes, yes. Winter squash, yes. Cucumbers, yes. I've even got a list of things to make with strawberries for 6 years from now when we have a huge strawberry bed. I've grilled the potatoes, stir fried them, broiled them, made a huge variety of fritatas....I haven't decided what tonight's version will be. I don't like French fries or traditional potato salad, so those are out. Maybe an herb pesto? Maybe throw them over the fence at the guy in the little white car who chooses to speed past our house every day......?

What I can't seem to find out is if potato plants ultimately have a finite number of potatoes, or do they just keep going & going & going until frost finally kills them off? Now I realize that most people would figure all of this out BEFORE planting the garden, but where's the fun in that??? Besides, I did have the pumpkin all planned out in advance, and ended up with patty pan squash, so that really only works when the garden chooses to cooperate, which doesn't seem to happen that often. Some people might have guessed ahead of time that potatoes are pretty prolific plants--if the failure of a single crop can cause a famine, they're obviously not growing lettuce, now are they?????

Think there's a chocolate potato cake recipe somewhere......?