My Stupid Breakfast Mistake
So, this all started yesterday morning. I was making toast, okay? Totally simple stuff. Got distracted by a squirrel outside the window (shiny thing, ya know?), forgot the toast, and bam – ended up with a charcoal brick. As I poked at this sad, blackened piece of bread, I suddenly went, “Wait… potatoes don’t burn like this! What’s their deal anyway? Never learned anything cool in school.” That weird little burnt-toast thought hooked me. Decided right then to dig into potato history myself.
Diving Down the Potato Rabbit Hole
Grabbed my laptop, spilled some coffee (of course), and just started googling like crazy. Found stuff that blew my mind. Seriously, school skipped all the juicy bits! Here’s what my digging turned up:
- First Stop: Peru! Apparently, people were munching on wild taters like over 10,000 years ago. TEN THOUSAND! They figured out how to grow them properly WAY earlier than I ever imagined. Mind kinda blown.
- Then, Europe Hated Them! This one cracked me up. When potatoes first showed up in Europe, folks were totally freaked out. Thought they were poisonous and, get this – the devil’s plant! Because they grew underground? Like, seriously? Kept calling them “unfit for humans.” How wrong they were! Took princes starving peasants to finally get people eating them. Crazy stubbornness!
- Oldest Potato Ever? Got stuck on this idea. How long do they last? Found out some dried-up potatoes discovered in Peru were dated back centuries. Then I remembered my own pantry… pulled out a shriveled dude from the back corner. Not centuries old, but easily a year or more. Gave it a sniff – surprisingly okay? Didn’t eat it though.
Putting Old Taters to the Test (Kind Of)
Okay, curiosity got the better of me. Found another slightly sprouty one in the pantry. Wasn’t gonna eat it raw. Figured, might as well see what happens if I plant it. Scrubbed off most of the dirt (wasn’t gonna be fussy), cut off the ugliest sprouty bits, poked it into a pot of leftover dirt near the window. Gave it some water. Basically winging it.
The Big Fail: Feeling pretty smart now, right? History researched, “ancient” potato saved from the trash, little science project going… Time to make lunch! Grabbed a fresh potato. Chopped it up quick for pan-frying. Got distracted checking my email on the stove-side tablet. Suddenly – smoke alarm screams! Burnt the absolute crap out of them. Thick black smoke everywhere. Opened windows, flapped a towel like a crazy person. My apartment smelled like a campfire. Lunch ruined. So much for learning from history – I basically repeated my morning toast disaster! Wasted half my milk trying to calm down the smoke detector.
The Sad Sandwich & A Tiny Lesson
Ended up just eating a sad cheese sandwich for lunch, staring at my sad window pot experiment. Burnt potatoes in the trash next to the burnt toast from breakfast. So here’s the big takeaway from my super deep potato dive: potatoes have been through SO much crap – crossing oceans, dealing with scaredy-cat Europeans, feeding whole armies. They’re survivors. And me? Apparently, I can’t cook one without setting off alarms. Maybe respect the humble spud more? Yeah. Gonna go buy frozen fries tomorrow.
