Making potatoes for dinner

I can never follow instructions, even or especially ones I set myself, like that I was going to make potatoes for dinner and write about it. As soon as I made that decision I could feel myself bucking against it. And last night this misgiving was confirmed when I found myself making ravioli instead. Or cooking store-bought ravioli, suspending it in sauce, I don’t make it. Considered cheating by pretending I cooked potatoes but then I cheated another way, in that I could still say I cooked with potatoes and didn’t lie, but only by omission. But since I’m writing it down anyway it’s not really a lie, more the performance of one.

We have just moved house. The new house is draughty and we don’t have an oven yet. Not that I’m complaining. I have been using a crockpot and an airfryer for everything. It’s surprising what you can do with an airfryer, but it’s the kind of surprise you’d have to have a hole drilled in the brain to raise an eyebrow to. Like how Jamie Oliver just wrote a book about airfryer cooking. It would have been just as interesting to not publish anything at all, or to publish a book filled with air, or to publish a book that was designed to be airfried, its pages edged with thyme and cheese. Today I put banana bread in the airfryer and it came out crisp and delicious.

Last night instead of making potato dinner like I said I made ravioli, but had an entree of chips. I cut the potatoes myself, making them into slender slices. I had them with sour cream and ajdar because that’s what was I had in the fridge. I was going to make it just for myself but then I caved when my husband walked in and made him a small bowl too. 

Potatoes are a complete food, in that they hold

protein, fat and carbohydrates. They are high in vitamin A. 

Potatoes have eyes but do not see in that old riddle. 

Some people don’t expect them to be real vegetables

But then find they are carbs instead but I think those people need to find

More potatoes and eat less diet culture garbage.

You can peel off their skin but that is where the nutrients are, a surface-level benefit, skindeep.

The more surface area a cut potato has when it is fried the worse it is for you. But that all depends on what you think worse means in this context.

I am  

Cheating my way to a better or worse poem

Taking the eyes off peeling the skin

With a kitchen knife so the vitamin-infused outline

Is shorn haphazardly away. 

I take you thin and crispy or soft and stale

I take us in nutritionally and psychologically dense.

You say potato, I say po tay to

You say po tay to, I run off with the busboy.

You say airfryer, I scald myself in a pot 

Of boiling oil which started out room temperature,

Like the so-said frog in a bathtub

When we eat the fries they are already hard and cold.

_{Footnote: this poem was created using the Double act constraint as the starting point.}