TracyFood

Celebrate potatoes! 21 November 2007 1:46 pm

Posted by Tracy in : books, breakfast, eating, garden, nepal, pictures, tea, travel , trackback

So writing yesterday’s post about my adventures in dal bhaat has me started on the subject of what I ate in Nepal, and while I’m in that happy head space, I’d like to discuss a little food revelation I had on that trip. It happened like this: when we got back to Kathmandu after the trek and I had to get back into making my own food decisions instead of eating whatever the Sherpas put in front of me, I discovered that I was a little sick of eggs, which had featured fairly prominently in a lot of our meals on trek. Whoa.

As I’ve written before, I love eggs. But faced with the Hotel Utse’s breakfast menu, I realized that what I really wanted was their Nepali breakfast:

or sometimes, their Special Tibetan Breakfast:

Note how there’s not an egg in sight on either of those plates, eh? One is fried roti (unleavened bread) and delicious potato-vegetable curry, the other is Tibetan flatbread and the Utse’s special shogo — potatoes cooked in some kind of savory-sweet tomato sauce involving fresh coriander and, well, magic. (Both breakfasts also included a pot of tea and offered the option of having the bread fried or not… mmm, fried bread. But I digress.)

My revelation was this: I love potatoes even more than I love eggs.

I will write it again: I love potatoes even more than I love eggs. I had no idea, but it’s true!

So you can well imagine my excitement at discovering that 2008 has been declared the International Year of the Potato by no less than the United Nations (specifically the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), but the General Assembly made the declaration, so hey). Sweet!

I’m all set: my last trip to my friendly local public library got me Larry Zuckerman’s Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World, and even Diesel Sweeties is on board:

So awesome! Just like potatoes themselves! I am so putting some in my garden next year, perhaps with a sign about how it’s their year even more so than usual. Yum, potatoes. I am looking forward to 2008 more than ever.