Hard potatoes and “Dishwater Soup”

A routine visit to see my grandmother on my dad’s side, where she was making us dinner, can never go well for someone after my dad tells me that she’s making a soup and I should at least pretend to like it.

I am not sure where the term came from exactly or who ever said it first, but it looked like and tasted like “Dishwater Soup.” If you can imagine a really dirty batch of dishwater that had been sitting for a while where the suds are gone, that is what it kind of looked like.

Apparently, I must have really hammed it up as kid, as we were given soup to take home. Dad seemed a bit upset with me in the car ride home and said something like, “I told you to like it, not pretend it was the best soup you ever had.”

I replied in kind that I wasn’t going to be eating any of that. It was fairly bad too. I couldn’t tell you what made it so bad either. Dad spent a few days having that in his lunch after that though. I am pretty sure he wasn’t too happy about that but we get a good chuckle about it now.

Another time my zealous nature with food came to bite me in the butt happened while working for a local farmer where I pitched hay bales as a young teenager.

Most of the days I worked there, they would make lunch. The everyday lunch they would have used to be soup and sandwiches or something simple. However, one day, they had made a big meal that included boiled potatoes.

I was excited about having some good hot foot for lunch, and I always have liked potatoes. I put some meat and veggies on my plate, then I put a big pile of diced boiled potatoes on my plate. It looked so good.

I ate a large portion of other things besides my potatoes before I put my fork into one of them. It seemed kind of hard pushing the fork in, and the first bite I had crunched. I swallowed it, reluctantly.

Inside my head, I was thinking that she must not have cooked them all the way accidentally. I was poking different ones to see if they were as hard and the first one I had. I figured someone at the table would say something about them about how they aren’t done.

Silence filled the table, that is except for the crunching everyone around the table was making while eating the potatoes like this is how a cooked potato is supposed to be!

I was still very hungry, but I suddenly became “situationally full” after realizing the potatoes were uncooked. I didn’t want to be rude. Slowly, bite after bite, I finished some of my potatoes and everything else that was on my plate. I hammed it up again, patting my belly, “I guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach. I’m too full to finish. I better get back to work.” My eyes were definitely not bigger than my stomach, and I was still hungry. I just couldn’t fathom eating any more crunchy, warm, uncooked potatoes.

So, if you are out there and you only warm your potatoes, not cook them, know that most people are not eating their potatoes warmed in this part of the world.

I like silent potatoes when I eat.