Food journal number 61: Reflections about a blue potato

When we run out of inspiration to cook new food experiments at home, we usually stick with our tried and trusted easy-cooking staples. Our staples-list vary from time to time. About a few years ago, we were really hooked on fish soup and red beet salad. Then, it was chicken with pesto and pasta salad. Nowadays our staples-list includes shrimp sandwich, a créme fraishe-based pasta dish, and pork chops. And at the end of the week, if we still can't think of anything else we'd like to eat, we either browse the cookbooks or I run to the grocery and buy "inspiration". This week's inspiration is the blue potato, a variant called Blue Congo.


But first, a little about potatoes in general. They're the fourth largest crop in the world, yet seldom used in Asian cooking except as a stew vegetable. The've also got the bad rep of being fattening and unhealthy when on the contrary, potato starch has the same good qualities as fiber and (even if cooking methods vary nutritional content) more nutritious and more filling than an equivalent amount of white rice or bread:

The average baked potato provides the recommended daily intake of riboflavin (viamin B2), three to four times the necessary amount of thiamin (vitamin B1) and niacin (vitamin B3), one and a half times the quantity of iron, and ten times the amount of vitamin C. It has almost no fat or salt and offers more potassium than a banana. It is one of the easiest types of starch to assimilate and contains two and a half times fewer carbohydrates than a similar quantity of bread, which makes the potato popular with diabetics.

According to mom's cookbook The Popular Potato, where that quote was from, the bad rep of the potato derives from the traditional practice of serving them with salt and fat, in the form of fries with ketchup (fat + salt + sugar), creamy sauces, etc. I recommend a warm potato salad with a small amount of mustard vinaigrette, thinly sliced onions, and capers. It tastes much better than mayo-based potato salad, and if you make the dessing yourself with a healthy kind of oil, it should be better for you too.

Another "threat" to the potato — and other crops grown in large monocultures — is that commercial demands, by e.g. fastfood chains that demand long fries, usually force farmers to grow a single kind of potato: the Russet Burbank in the case of the US. In Sweden, King Edward and Asterix are the ones usually sold in groceries, but other varieties occasionally appear in limited amounts (e.g. Amandine, and lately, Blue Congo). The Incas however, as story has it, grew all kinds of potatoes in different colors and shapes: they were much less smooth than the potato-shape we know and prefer, and came in all shades of red and blue and yellow. This diversity made sure that, in case one variety failed due to plant disease, the Incas still had lots of potatoes to eat. It also diversified the potato gene pool.

It isn't really the time to talk about environmental-philosophical questions, but it does make you wonder about how our preferences (e.g. for round, large, firm potatoes) changed the landscape of potato varieties while also helping the potato, as a species, become the world's fourth largest crop by increasing their chances of survival. Are you reading Micheal Pollan's books yet? Do!

Back to my blue potatoes, the Blue Congo. It's exotic, it's interesting. According to internet sources, they also have higher antioxidant content than regular potatoes, and keep more than 75% of these antioxidants even after cooking. Why did I buy them? Mostly because it's interesting and I think it might be more healthy, but not for ecological reasons in mind. I followed the serving suggestion at the back of the potato bag and mixed the cooked, diced potatoes together with a green salad. We had an abundance of lemons, so lemon juice was the only dressing. The texture is a bit crumbly, and it tastes like a mild, creamy potato. The potatoes turned bright beet-purple with lemon juice.


Whether increased consumption of other crop varieties (for egositic reasons) will eventually lead to a change in the agricultural landscape (for ecological benefit) and what consequences the demand for slower-growing varieties have in terms of decreased food output on limited tillable land is likely a question that I will not have an answer to today. But did I get food inspiration? Yes. The next experiment will be to roughly mash the blue potatoes and serve it with steak.

Handball!

Back in gradeschool, we usually played three kinds of "-ball" sports: basketball, volleyball and "touching-ball" — the latter being a dodge ball variation where we used an oversized hankerchief tightly knotted into a ball. In highschool, the ball sports narrowed down into basket and volley. Otherwise, we spent P.E. class learning Asian dance (I'm ashamed to say) and native games such as relay racing on stilts (in which my section, represented by yours truly and two others, won the inter-year competitions!).

In college, the ball games narrow down even more and "ball game" becomes more or less equivalent to "basketball", as it is in the rest of the Philippines. Basket is the non-official national sport, overshadowing the real national sport sepak takraw (kick volleyball), much so that the latter is rarely even heard of.

One tends to think that his or her country is the most "normal" in all the world — a feeling that is probably even stronger in island nations. So when I first heard about previously un-heard of sports such as floorball and handball here, my first impressions were that these were strange versions of (both North American-originating) hockey and basket. We know too little of European / other sports, with the exception of soccer, which is known, but not often played, in the Philippines. In fact, floorball and handball are both established world sports. The Men's World Handball Championships is ongoing in Sweden as I write, and though the fact stands that many of the teams are European, up there on the top qualifiers are Argentina and South Korea. Even the Philippines apparently has a local handball federation, but as I said, this is likely not in the list ball sports that most people know about. It's a shame, because otherwise, we would have probably have had this exciting sport for P.E. instead of Asian dance.

Since most of my readers will know the rules of basketball, I'm naming this section: The Differences between basket and handball (with pictures taken from the internet) to explain handball rules in a nutshell:

1. In handball, there is goalkeeper and the goal is reminiscent of a small football goal rather than a basket. (In our P.E. lessons, they were particular to point out that it Dr. James T. Naismith used peach baskets when he invented basketball. Why this would be important is beyond me.)


2. Like basketball, the aim is to put as many balls into the opponents' goal. The handball ball fits an open hand, so it is much smaller than a basketball and can be passed and recieved easily in the air using one hand.

3. One goal equals one point (no three-pointers!)

4. Instead of the "starting five", handball teams have six starting players in the field with the exception of the goalkeeper.


5. These other players are not allowed inside the goal perimeter, so to get a shot, the players have to fight their way through opposing team members, who in their turn try to create a defensive formation around the goal perimeter, like a wall.

6. The defensive team tries everything, short of illegal moves like shirt-pulling and injurous moves such as pulling on the thrower's arm, to stop the offensive team from creating goal chances. This is one major difference from the rules of basketball, where it is absolutely not allowed to have body contact with the opponents. When the offensive player with the ball gets "trapped" by the defense, the referee stops the game and the offensive team gets another try at a new strategy.


7. The offensive team tries to create a game play to get around the wall of defense. They can feign and pass the ball to free players (just as in basket), until they have a good goal chance or until their time is up and the ball goes to the other team. If they commit an offensive foul, the game play stops and the ball goes to the other team.

8. One of the more graceful moves in handball is when a player with a clear shot jumps and suspends in the air to throw the ball in the goal. There's a lot of explosivity and coordination in there. Once they find a gap in the wall, jumping gives them more time to aim and gives them a chance at fooling the goalkeeper, who has been actively blocking the goal from unexpected shots throughout the gameplay. They also have to make the shot without stepping into the goalkeeper's area, but by leaping, they can close the distance and try for a goal as long as their feet haven't landed yet. It is illegal to block a player with a clear goal chance.


9. All in all, it seems like a more challenging, explosive, physical game than basketball, and that's what makes it so exciting. Because of the physical nature of the game, players also change more often in order to last the two 30-minute sets (basketball has 4 quarters of 12 minutes).

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a handball match on TV at 8:00 (Sweden vs. Poland) so I have to publish this post and eat dinner so I can watch it. Maybe you can even catch some handball games where you live, through cable TV?