First early potatoes

The first early potatoes of the year give us always joy. In March the old ones start to wrinkle and it is difficult even to peel. So you wait day after day, looking them growing, for the moment you will finally have a chance to taste them. Cooking the first tortilla with the early potatoes has something of a ritual, a huge pleasure of luxury poorness, as Emilio Santiago Muíño would have said.

Yes, I know nowadays it is possible to buy early potatoes, or at least what they look like, during all year round, but in this way there is no fun. Above everything, they don’t taste like ours. There is a different pleasure, a bigger one, when you wait for your crop to grow, to collect and to eat it in the corresponding season, than to simply buying out of season products coming from the other side of the planet, full of pesticides to allow their conservation during the transport, and in many occasions products that are produced in non ethical way.

The other day a friend of mine, asked if it was worth to grow the potatoes by hand as I do, in the ecological way, knowing the cost of it. But honestly, having your own early potatoes it is a bliss, abundance, the basic of a garden, something to be proud of for sure, and to gift the ones you love with a box of this goodness is an act of potato love that is always well accepted.