We went to Broadway Market for brunch. Brunch turned out to be the only thing I didn’t take any pictures of.
Róisín was very much the victim of my photography on this particular jaunt.
So we wandered the market – which is delightful – and then we went into a French deli called la bouche, and they had black potatoes on sale.
Any of you who know anything about me will realise that I’m not a man who can walk past a stall selling bizarrely gothic vegetables.
And when you’ve got some black potatoes and red wine. You know what else you need?
I’ve never roasted beef before. In fact I’ve only ever done one roast. Me and my Edinburgh flatmate Patrick roasted a chicken one evening. The recipes (for the chicken, this is. Try and keep up.) said to roast it until the juices ran clear. I’m still not sure why, but by the time the juices ran clear it was past eleven o’clock at night.
So I canvassed advice from a) my mate Kris and b) the internet. Turns out roast beef is really easy.
THERE WILL BE PICTURES OF THE INSIDE OF THE BLACK POTATOES VERY SOON.
ARE YOU EXCITED?
OKAY HERE IT IS.
Time for a seismic shift in nomenclature. Thus far we have been referring to BLACK POTATOES. Going forward, we will refer to the tubers du jour as PURPLE POTATOES. Take a second to repeat the words PURPLE POTATOES out loud a few times to help you adjust to this shift.
If you want to video yourself doing this and post it in the comments I can’t say I’d be unhappy about it.
Check out that smoked garlic in the background lookin’ all smokin’ and sultry. Mm-mmm.
Alright I hope you’ve got somewhere comfortable to sit because it is time for a revelation.
PURPLE.
POTATOES.
MAKE.
WATER.
GREEN.
I spent a while wondering what to do with the weird green potato water and then I ended up pouring it away because there’s not much you can realistically achieve with a pint glass full of water that used to be bits of potato but OH MY WORD LOOK AT THE COLOUR.
Black on the outside. Purple within. Green in their watery emanations. Can you even?
Personally I can even but I would regard it as completely reasonable if you were unable to even. I hear some people have difficulty evening in such circumstances. If you can’t even you might want to bookmark this page, then turn your computer off and sit in silence for a few minutes until you yet again find yourself capable of evening.
Are we all back?
Can we all even?
Then I’ll continue.
AAAAND CUT.
Cut your potatoes into delicious purple chunks and dip them in gravy, that is. They were really good, as it happens. Quite dense and nutty.
That bread is from Broadway Market too, it was called Old Kentucky Rye. I feel like Ol’ Kentucky Rye should be a character in some sort of horror story set in a swamp (in Kentucky). She’d be an old woman who the protagonists were scared to approach for help because she sat out the front of her shack all day with a shotgun in her lap and a mean glint in her eye. But Ol’ Kentucky Rye would turn out to know a thing or two about the terrors of the swamp, yessiree.
EDIT: I’ve now been informed that the bread may well have been called Old Milwaukee Rye. The point still stands except I have no idea whether there are swamps in Milwaukee.
DOUBLE EDIT: Apparently the city of Milwaukee was built on a swamp. So I seem to be on safe ground (except that the ground is a swamp)
This post was brought to you by oddly-coloured vegetables everywhere. And I think there’s an important message: no matter what the colour of your skin, or flesh, or the juices which you emanate…
…when you get right down to it, we’re all delicious once we’re smothered in olive oil and roasted for a while.
