Offspring of the Holy Family Potato

It’s been one of those days. It isn’t raining, so you decide to go to the garden. As soon as you get there, it starts to sprinkle. As soon as you get back in the house, it stops. I was spared the going out and coming in, as I was in the kitchen this morning making braised beef ribs. It never seems like it’s going to take an hour and a half to get them in the oven when I read the recipe, but there it is. Then you have to turn them every 40 minutes. I got a lot of other chores done in the meanwhile.

Terry kept working through the drizzle until lunch. He had a couple of dry hours after that. Now we are getting a serious rain, for which we are glad. The dry, hot wind of the last couple days left our seedlings looking poorly.

Some time ago, I planted the Holy Family Potato. My intention was to grow it in a pot until it was warm enough to plant outside. On Friday, I was poised to carry out my mission. The foliage was looking pretty senescent, I have to say. When I got the plant out of the pot, lo and behold, there was a potato! I took it to the garden to show Hilda. We shook the soil from the roots and found several potatoes as well as the former Holy Family potato turned to slime.

“It’s just enough for your supper,” Hilda said. “You can fry them. I love fried new potatoes.”

New potatoes from the Holy Family Potato, with quarter to keep you from thinking this was a lot.

I showed Terry the harvest, which I could hold in one hand. He suggested that it would be good for the space station, if you could get that much food in three weeks.

“It’s been longer than that,” I reminded him, “and the real trouble is that I don’t think we had much of an increase in biomass. The new potatoes probably weigh about the same as the seed potato.”

I cooked them up, and they were delicious. I even took a spoonful up for Hilda.

Fried Holy New Potatoes

Also on Friday, I went to Menards and bought a new area rug for the TV room. You may recall that we got rid of the other rug after Della peed on it twice. It never smells the same, trust me. I had purchased that beige rug, no lie, specifically because it more or less matched the color of cat puke.  You own a cat, you have to plan for these kinds of things. Sometimes you can get the whole stain, and sometimes you can’t. Now that we are catless, I bought a rug that I actually like. It has colors and pattern. It looks very nice. I realize one must guard against thinking that shopping can solve one’s problems, but this rug made me feel less sad. It changes the acoustics. Terry noticed right away that it absorbs sound. For me, though, it seems to absorb the silence (with all due respect to Simon and Garfunkel). The house doesn’t seem as quiet and empty.  And thus we take one more step toward the new normal.

The new rug