Week before last I bought a 10-pound bag of potatoes on sale at Meijer for just $1.69, well below my target price of $1.99. I remember thinking they looked like good, sturdy potatoes, and knowing that I once counted 41 potatoes in a 10-pound bag, I couldn’t help running the figures in my head, right there in the store: 17 cents a potato if there were just 10 in the bag. But no, there were likely four times that many, so these potatoes likely cost only about 4 cents each.
This would’ve been a fantastic buy -- if I hadn’t plunked them down in a corner of the pantry, next to a giant bag of grapefruit that I’d bought on sale just a few days earlier. I baked a big batch of eight or so potatoes that week, and then didn’t get into the bag again until Super Bowl Sunday, when I was preparing to make diet stuffed potato halves (see recipe below). When I peeked inside, I recoiled in horror: the potatoes on top were slimy, and those on the bottom had literally been liquified into a foul potato soup.
So much for my savvy potato investment. But in grocery shopping, as in sports and life in general, you’ve got to move on. Ruminate on a mistake, and you’ll miss your next opportunity.
In this case, I’m moving on by running an experiment: Do citrus fruits really produce death rays when forced to share housing with potatoes? Or did I just misjudge the quality of the potatoes in the first place? (The potatoes were purchased on Jan. 30, and had been reduced to mush by Feb. 7.)
An initial search on the Web didn’t yield any insights on this question. Plenty of people have theories on the danger of storing onions with potatoes, but apparently nobody else is dim enough to store potatoes with grapefruit (and oranges; a couple of days after I bought the potatoes I bought a big bag of oranges, and put it in the same corner.)
At any rate, yesterday afternoon we put an orange and a potato (purchased on Super Bowl Sunday) in a mixing bowl. When I checked it early this morning the potato looked and felt fine on the surface, but when I picked it up there was a wet spot underneath. We’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, here’s that recipe for diet stuffed potato halves, courtesy of Weight Watchers Weekly:
Cajun-style Potato Skins
2 large potatoes, baked, cooled and cut in half length-wise
1/4 cup barbecue sauce
1/8 tsp hot pepper sauce
3/4 cup cooked chicken breast, chopped or shredded
1/4 cup shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Scoop out half the potato from each half and set aside to use later, in soup or mashed potatoes. Combine barbecue sauce and hot pepper sauce and spoon into the potato halves. Fill each potato with 3 T. chicken and top with 1 T. cheese. Put in baking dish and bake for 8 minutes, or until cheese melts and potatoes are hot.
Note: These potato halves are supposed to be 3 Weight Watchers points per serving, but I think that’s if you use the big baking potatoes bought individually. I used regular potatoes from a 10-pound bag, and there was no way I could fit 3 T. of chicken in each potato half. So I’m guessing using smaller potatoes, you might count this as about 1.5 points. But that’s just a guess. (BTW, according to my handy-dandy Weight Watchers points-calculating “slide rule,” three points ranges from 120 calories and 2-12 grams of fat for something with zero grams of fiber to 100 calories and 15-20 grams of fat if it also contains 3 grams of fiber. Actually, that’s not so much a range as simply two different settings on the old slide rule. Not very definitive, but just to give you an idea.)
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