Wednesday, August 21, 2013

No excuses...

I have no excuse for not blogging these past few days.  The kids were here Friday through Sunday, but other than that I have not been doing much at all.  I guess I should be thankful it is laziness and not something drastically wrong.  I don't know why, but when I get interrupted in blogging, it is sometimes so hard to pick back up and start.  However, if I go ahead and schedule a post or two and keep it going when I am otherwise occupied, I do so much better.
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As you can see from the photo above, I have been doing something...but what?  Stay tuned...hopefully within the next month or two I will have something to show you.  I cannot get to it right now since I still am working with my last two little quilt tops.  Or rather making the backing for them.  One is made, and started the other one earlier today.  I hope to finish it sometime before this day is over and then get them pin-basted before the weekend is out.
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I saw this post of Judy's a few days ago....it had a picture of potatoes that they had just dug.  My thoughts went immediately to home.  We always 'ridged' the dirt up around the potatoes as they grew...then when young taters formed, the bigger they grew the bigger the crack would grow in the dirt that covered them.

We always looked forward to the day that mom thought there would be some big enough to 'gravel' out as she called it.  We would look for the biggest crack and carefully rake/dig the dirt away to get to the potatoes.  We would choose a few of the biggest that were forming...always choosing some an inch or two in diameter. I think we would get maybe a couple or three per hill if we were lucky.  We never just dug up the whole plant....we left the smaller ones to grow.

We would do a few hills of potatoes this way...enough to get a mess of potatoes.  And at each plant, we always pushed the dirt back over the remaining potatoes that were developing.  And it never seemed to really harm the plant to the best of my recall.

For those of you who have never done this, the skin on young potatoes is paper thin...we would run water over them and then just scrap the skin away with a knife.  Then if they were just over an inch in diameter, mom left them whole, but if they were getting up close to two inches or so...she would cut them in half...and put them on the stove in a pot of water to cook that way a little while.

Then she would take them out and fry them....leaving them whole or halved.  Talk about good food!  Oh, my mouth is watering now just thinking about it.