Mon Night POTATO T – A Man! A Plan! A Canal! Cthulhu!

Okay, so I'm bad at palindromes. My potatoes have started to go Elder Gods shortly after purchase due to the unseasonably warm temperatures. They're sprouting, in other words. Loathsome but not exactly squamous or cyclopean. It's too early in the day to look up appropriate Lovecraftian descriptors. Apologies.

Hey dere, ho dere.

Glycoalkaloids are toxic but not dangerous in small quantities*. I just find the reproductive process of tubers so gross. So I'm scraping and scaling, gouging and plucking, slicing and cubing. A bleary-eyed, uninspired Gordon Ramsay Bolton, muttering "Kneel, Reek," or non sequiturishly, "Surrender, Dorothy." 

Surrender, Dorothy!

Cubed taters, olive oil, ~tbsp paprika, salt & pepper. Toss. Bake at 425° for about 30 minutes. Chop half a big yellow onion, red pepper, two cloves garlic and sauté til lightly browned, remove from heat. Add cubes and mix. And voilà! Easy peasy breakfast potatoes. Enough for a weekend's breakfasts with French toast, omelets, pancakes (it's March 1, btw). A couple snags tho: It's about three times more potatoes than I usually make so I tripled the ingredients and needed to use the wok. The wok embarrasses me a little because I feel a bit like an Asian stereotype, with my soy sauce and Ginsu knives. Somewhere a gong sounds. The peasants in the rice patties are singing about misery. A dog barks. But also the wok always gets that stupid Aerosmith song stuck in my head. You know the one.

just give me a keeeyyissssss

So I moved the shoji screen back into the room where the terracotta bowls await healing. The younger is making paper cranes. The sound of the older bowing her erhu reminds me of the story of Hoichi the Earless, the wandering biwa player from Kwaidan. A haiku about a fallen branch and rain in the air blossoms from my mind:

A nest for sparrow 

has become shelter for ants 

why does the sky weep?

drawing on the phone is annoying

Saved the taters, but the red pepper, alas, I could not save. Which sounds like a sad Scottish ballad. "A Lass I Couldnae Save" (Child Ballad #26**). I had no other veggies except a sketchy looking carrot, some lettuce, and broccoli. Nobody wants sketchy carrot, lettuce, and broccoli breakfast taters I'll tell you what. I sliced up a green pepper earlier this week, but one of us can't eat them without upsetting their digestion. So I settled for onions and garlic and nought else. Now I've enough potatoes to feed a ragged company of Union soldiers. Just don't call me Cooky or else it's just hardtack and shoe leather for you.

Cooky "Squamous" Amos with bonus
occuplanid from the potato sack

So what's everyone eating? What's going horribly wrong in your fridge? Ever get pantry moths or beetles? So disgusting, especially if they get into your rice. 

tldr for fokes wot jes dusnt lik reedin folderol : Trending on Backtalk–

1. Barkwoof vs Meowpur
2. Fude wot iz et √
3. Ow my akin boddy
4. Wethers is uggh emmirigth
5. Polyticks

*********

* There are faster, more effective ways of getting rid of your neighbor who keeps blowing leaves onto your lawn (Damn you, Witold!) than trying to get him to eat a vat of potato sprouts. Waiting for old age to do its work or laser-focusing his attention to yet another election cycle are probably quicker, for example.

** Child Ballad #26 is actually the Scottish folk song "Twa Corbies".