Yucky Baked Potato

I made a baked potato last night. It was one of the regular brown russet potatoes and when I cut it open and got ready to drizzle a little ketchup on it and I found this big, ugly, black crusty-looking thing in the middle. It looked to me like an unborn twin potato, or like an alien that had burrowed in there under cover of night and died before it could fully mutate into something resembling a potato with the goal of infesting every other potato on the planet and it was kind… I take that back, it was really nauseating to look at.

So I threw the potato away and silently mourned the loss of the bulk of my dinner. After I had recovered from that trauma I went to the Idaho potato website and I asked Dr. Potato what the heck that monstrous looking thing was and I learned that my yucky potato had what’s called “Hollow Heart”. Despite the fact I’ve never seen it before, it’s apparently a common problem with potatoes and it has something to do with slow and fast growth alternating during the growing months after the potato has been planted. Makes no sense to me but who am I to doubt the good doctor. The doctor went on to reassure me that it’s not a disease and that the yucky part can be cut out and the rest of the potato eaten.

Good chance of that ever happening in my house.

For all I know, Dr. Potato is covering for the aliens that are trying to take over Earth’s potatoes.

Dear Doctor Potato: while I thank you for reassuring me, there’s no way I’m going to eat a potato with “Hollow Heart” in it!

(Does all this talk of ‘potato’ and ‘potatoes’ make anyone else remember Dan “Potatoe” Quayle?)

Hollow heart. Hopefully my potato ordeal wasn’t an omen of some sort and trying to tell me something.

Alas, affairs of the heart. Hollow heart 😦

Hollow heart 😦