Vol. 3: Hi From Inside a 6-Ton Potato
And an excellent spicy vodka sauce I make 1 billion times per week.
Hey! Just me, reporting back for my monthly newsletter, like last month and the month before that!
Just kidding, that wouldn’t be fair to the stranger who has trolled me so aggressively about my delinquency that she literally commented this on an Instagram post announcing I was engaged:
Maybe it was the kick in the pants I needed!
Anyway, a lot1 has2 been3 going down4 since my last dispatch, but I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say, here’s a newsletter all about potatoes. First up, please enjoy an account of my descent into madness, after I traveled across the country to spend the night in a six-ton potato. (Or don’t enjoy it! I certainly didn’t.) The potato essay is the most recent installment of my column Tenth Helpings, and usually I don’t recycle work here that’s been published elsewhere (😘😘😘), but this was a particularly harrowing experience and I feel the need to foist it upon you.
Then, scroll to the bottom for a spicy vodka sauce recipe that I eat approximately every four minutes. Sometimes vodka is made with potatoes. That’s the whole connection to the giant potato essay. Whatever. It’s a great pasta.
SLEEPLESS IN A SIX-TON POTATO
This first appeared on Food52.com, as the latest installment of my Tenth Helpings column. It appeared second as a print-out on my parents’ kitchen table.
I know a place where you can go to be alone. It’s got a roof over it, with a door that locks. There’s a bed and a sink and a kettle for coffee, and from most angles, the land on which it sits is stunningly green, and stunningly flat. The packaged snacks are free and abundant, and there is a rabbit who hops around the property as if he hadn’t yet decided what he’d get up to that day. There is a cow named Dolly who will wander by, shooting you reproachful glances until you acquiesce and stick your hand beneath the dispenser that overflows with edible pellets. Her gratitude will make you blush. It is the place where I began and ended one of the weirdest nights of my life, and it is a six-ton potato, thirty minutes southeast of Boise, Idaho.
Like many people, I spent much of the pandemic fantasizing about the “after.” Unlike those other people, my fantasies included a metal tube measuring roughly twelve by twenty-eight feet, designed to be a perfect scale replica of an Idaho potato.
The genesis of the giant potato was something like this: About a decade ago, the Idaho Potato Commission had a six-ton scale replica of their mascot created from fiberglass, a sort of shock-jock advertisement fabricated to tour the country on the back of a flatbed. After seven years on the road, the Commission handed the keys to a woman named Kristie Wolfe.
Wolfe supervised as the enormous potato was deposited onto a 400-acre property at the intersection of U.S. Highway 26 and an access road. She completed an overhaul of its interior, outfitting it with millennial pink club chairs, a queen bed with a white linen comforter, and a chandelier designed to look like a handful of candles suspended in moose antlers.
It opened for business just in time for Earth Day, 2019, eleven months before the world shut down.
I have wanted to just briefly escape my own life for as long as I can remember. My fiancé has accused me more than once of chronic mental wandering, or as he calls it, “Not listening to the story about the time he got hit on at La Colombe.” The desire to put all of my stock in some fantasy of the future — to dip out of a dinner without saying bye, to flee the country and spend days floating in an anonymous body of water while picking at a decent sandwich — has been my most consistent quality. One of my earliest memories is kneeing my dad in the balls at another toddler’s Gymboree party, so he would take me to the car and reprimand me. I couldn’t think of a quicker way out.
When the pandemic descended, I began to feel like fuzzy wall insulation was slowly, steadily filling my apartment until I couldn’t see the window. Death, sadness, and fear had never been so tangible. Some people put their anxiety and dread to good use on the frontlines. I spent hours each week maneuvering the little yellow Google Maps guy onto side streets in Tokyo, in pursuit of deafening, smoky Pachinko parlors.
It was a different sort of depression than the one I was accustomed to. I was a foot about to hit the floor in a stutter-step I would have preferred to skip. I wanted a soft, permanent landing. And if I couldn’t have that, then I wanted to pretend I was in a gambling hall, nibbling at 7-Eleven fried chicken I’d snuck in, in my purse. I kept my passport on the kitchen table, as though at any moment I might be summoned overseas.
I learned of the giant potato in the most cursory of ways: through a stranger on the internet. I looked forward to his weekly dispatches of bizarre news stories, like “Salmon Going Nuts at a Fish Farm Possibly High on Cocaine, Officials Say,” or simply, “German Pentathlon Coach Disqualified After Punching Horse.”
I can’t recall exactly when it was that he posted, “Spend the Night in the Most Famous Potato,” only that it was sometime in the in-between. After things got really scary, before there was much hope. After sourdough, before Olivia Rodrigo. Sometime around when I discovered Baby Foot and became obsessed with shaving off thin layers of myself to pass the days.
But I do recall the weeks after: the time I spent obsessing about the World’s Largest Potato. Reading about it online. Murmuring the AirBnb reviews aloud from a sort of mechanical massage chair I’d stumbled upon, in my in-laws’ basement: “10/10 time at the spud.” “The potato is like a big cocoon — it's dark and quiet.”
A man called Frank Muir, President of the Idaho Potato Commission, had apparently once said of the World’s Largest Potato: "If you really just wanted to know what it’s like to be inside a potato, as opposed to having a potato inside you, here's a great opportunity to experience it.”
That sounded exactly like me.
The potato became a mythical escape, domestic and contained, safe, attainable. Ridiculous, yet respectable. Away from it all. Something an unsuspecting editor might green-light as an expense.
I’d been turning over the idea of escapism, trying to fit it into a neat space in my mind. Eventually I talked to David Gonzalez, a psychotherapist based in Northern California, who had made the mistake of once meeting me through my sister. When I got him on the phone one Saturday morning, Gonzalez told me that escapism is more of an abstraction, a tendency that could be related to diagnosable conditions, but not something with its own pathology.
“It’s pretty much just diversion from unpleasant, boring aspects of everyday life,” he said. “It can involve daydreaming, using your imagination, or engaging in things — we all have escapist tendencies to cope, but there are different degrees of extremity.”
At the most extreme end of the spectrum, someone experiencing active, ongoing trauma might dissociate as an escapist means to survive. On the other end of the spectrum, a neurotic with a life of great privilege and health might turn to the Google Maps guy when she gets bored, or sad, or hungry.
In the summer of 2021, I finally visited the potato. The day did not get off to a great start.
“What happened to your glasses?” asked a kind man behind the Hertz counter of the Boise airport when I stumbled from the plane, my left arm numb from bearing the weight of a leaden-headed unaccompanied minor named Reese. He had sleep-kicked me with his tiny sneakers for the duration of our flight.
“Reese had a nightmare,” I told the kind man. My glasses had been in my shirt pocket, which Reese had immediately identified as an ideal plane pillow.
The Hertz man and I chatted about Boise for a few minutes. He’d lived there his whole life.
“Do you like potatoes?” I asked.
“To each his own,” he said cryptically, and handed me my keys.
SPICY VODKA SAUCE RECIPE
More than likely, this doesn’t qualify as traditional vodka sauce, so let this be your warning before you embarrass yourself at a dinner party. (The sauce’s origins are hotly disputed, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.)
Ingredients:
Kosher salt
3/4 pound rigatoni or other dried pasta
2ish tablespoons olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 sweet Italian sausages, uncased
5 tablespoons tomato paste, double concentrated
2 teaspoons red pepper flakes (or more, or less, depending on your spice proclivity)
1/2 cup vodka (I use Tito’s), plus more if needed
1 cup cream
Recipe:
Set a large pot of covered, heavily salted water to boil on your best burner.
Meanwhile, on your lesser burner, heat 2 tablespoons or so of olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat for 2 minutes, until it’s nice and loose (if you tip the pan, you’ll see “olive oil fingers” drifting from one side to the other). Add the onion and sauté about 6 to 8 minutes, or longer depending on your heat source, until it’s deeply yellow and translucent with edges beginning to caramelize. Push the onion to the sides, creating a well in the center of the saucepan.
(FOR MEAT-FREE NOODS, SKIP THIS STEP AND MOVE TO #4.) Add your uncased sausage to the well. Let it brown without disturbing for several minutes, then break it up into tiny pieces and mix it in with the onion as it continues to brown. When there’s just a hint of pink left, make another well in the center and...
Turn the heat to medium low. Add the tomato paste and red pepper flakes to the well. Sauté, stirring into the rest of the pan’s contents, about 4 to 5 minutes, until the tomato paste has turned a dark brick red, and the bottom of your pan has all sorts of browned bits going on.
While the tomato paste is cooking, check in on your water. When it’s at a boil, add your noodles and set a timer for 3 minutes before the package says they’ll be done.
Back to the other burner, where your tomato paste and onion situation is dark red and smells delicious!!!! Turn the heat back to medium and add the vodka. Use the sizzling liquid to scrape up everything stuck to the pan. If the vodka evaporates too quickly, add another splash so your tomatoey-oniony mixture is the consistency of a thick chili. Add the cream, and mix or whisk well to bring everything together, until you have a consistently orange cream sauce.
Bring sauce to a simmer and cook for another 4 to 6 minutes, until it’s reduced by about a third, and no longer tastes like it might give you a hangover. By now, your noodles should be nearly finished. Steal about 1/2 cup of the starchy, salty cooking water, and whisk it into your thickened sauce. Let the sauce come back to a simmer.
When your noodles are al dente, reserve another 3/4 cup of the water, and transfer noodles to the sauce. Stir to coat over low heat. They should be saucy and glossy, so if things are looking too dry, add more of the reserved cooking water a splash at a time. (You could also add some grated parmesan at this point, but I rarely do!) Season to taste with another 1/2 teaspoon or so of kosher salt, and serve.
Make the pasta! Leave a comment! Or reply directly to this email with feedback! If I don’t get back to you it’s because I just ordered more Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and I’m eating it in bed with one of their little sandwiches that somehow burns the roof of my mouth a full hour after it’s made!
I learned
Dunkin’ Donuts
Delivers
And I have been drinking delivery coffee in my bed
congrats ella and nate!
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