Purple Congo Potatoes

‘I need potatoes!’, says the cook to the gardener…

‘AAhhRRrr!!!’ thinks the gardener, potatoes being out of season just now…

‘How about some nice beans? – I’ve got plenty of beans…’, says the gardener hopefully, earning a black look. This recipe calls for potatoes apparently, and there’s no suggestion in here that the gardener trudging down to the local shops is going to solve this one…

‘Potatoes from the garden’, repeats the cook, with all a woman’s logic and with just a faint suggestion that the gardener is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

If potatoes are needed in the kitchen, there must as a consequence be potatoes available somewhere in the garden.

‘OK, now we’re reduced to eating weeds’, thinks the gardener, no longer daring to speak his thoughts out loud. The family is coming to dinner in a few hours time – who needs a crisis on the threshold of that?

So weeds it is – ‘purple congo potato’ weeds, which live forever apparently, as I started with a handful from a fellow seed-saver decades ago, and the damn things just won’t go away – there's always one left in the ground that kicks off the next weed, and I know there’s a patch right down the back getting in the way of my developing pumpkins.

So out with the potato hoe, and 15 minutes later, a few kilograms of the world's ugliest potatoes make their way up to the kitchen to earn an ‘I told you so!’ look from the cook. A good husband is a man who understands just what his wife doesn’t say, so silence fills the silence that follows.

At least I don’t have to peel the bloody things (they’re tiny); we just cut them in half, skins and all, and drop them in the chicken curry. They make a very pretty mashed potato too, and don’t taste bad when roasted…

All’s well that end’s well, I guess.